Nancy's Reads & Reels: "The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach and “The Submission” by Amy Waldman

These are two books having nothing to do with each other except that I read them and they are both captivating in their own way.

The Art of Fielding is a book about baseball that ordinarily wouldn’t appeal to me, but after I read an article in the October issue of Vanity Fair, The Book on Publishing, by Keith Gessen (a friend of the author) my curiosity was aroused.

The Art of Fielding grabbed me from the first page and kept me reading all 528 pages. The characters are quirky, even some of the names, which doesn’t always work, but in this book it does.

All the action takes place at a small midwestern college.

I might even say that the book is about failure and how the characters deal with it: the baseball player and his roommate, the coach, the president of the college and his young daughter. All have failed but they keep on keeping on.

When an excerpt of The Submission by Amy Waldman appeared in the Atlantic, it stayed with me and I felt I had to read the book. I wrote down the title on one of the many scraps of paper floating around my house.

In the midst of the Christmas rush I stopped by The Blue Elephant without said scrap of paper and haltingly explained to the clerk the subject of the book and that the title began with an “S” and somehow between the two of us we came up with the actual title. In my defense, I think I remembered an approximation of the author’s name

As Michiko Kakutani writes in The New York Times review, The Submission revolves around a 9/11 memorial jury, which picks “the right architect with the wrong name — Mohammad Khan.” A reporter discovers the jury’s choice and chaos ensues. Khan is a stubborn man who feels that his work should be judged only on its merits and his views on anything else are nobody’s business.

Forgetting 9/11 is impossible and so books will be written and movies made — Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close comes to mind. I’ll probably go see it despite the tragedy of a young boy losing his father as the subject and the rather poor reviews.

The Submission seems timely with the recent controversy about a mosque being built near the 9/11 site, and when you factor in how politics gets mixed in with the issue and how those who lost family members react, you wonder how you would react in the same situation. One hopes for tolerance but you never know until you’re in a situation.