Love, war, and baseball.
There's a book so good, and so universal, that I can recommend it to you with complete confidence without knowing who you are. It does precisely what great literature is there for: articulating the human condition.
Each of my parents count the book as their favorite. They each read it as young adults, and then aloud it each other when I was a kid; I'd hear them weeping from their upstairs bedroom. I read it as an 18-year-old and it immediately became my favorite too. When I started working at a bookstore a couple years later, I wrote a staff selection declaring it the "Great American Novel," and I'd hand-sell it to absolutely anyone who asked me for a recommendation. The book was over a decade old and was never a bestseller, but we kept a half-dozen copies in stock at all times to keep up with the newfound demand.
The book is called The Brothers K (yes, like the Dostoyevsky, but without the "aramazov"). It's by Oregon novelist and essayist David James Duncan, and it was released in 1992. You should read it, you'll thank me later.
The Brothers K is about the Chance family of Camas, Washington. The patriarch of the family is the memorable "Papa" Chance, a former minor league baseball pitcher. He and his deeply religious wife have six children: four boys and two young twin girls. The boys take turns as protagonists of a story primarily narrated by the youngest, Kincaid, who relates the exploits of his older brothers. The eldest is Everett, who passionately protests the Vietnam War and writes beautiful love letters. Peter is a naturally gifted athlete who prefers academics and spiritual enlightenment. And the guileless Irwin, my cat's namesake, is deeply loyal and religious when he's sent to fight in the war.
The boys all love baseball and are deeply invested in their father's return to the sport after an accident at his mill job. Perfect, poetic baseball analogies are woven throughout the book. Reading it ignited a love of baseball in me that has influenced my life dramatically, and I'm permanently grateful. Duncan imbues the game with so much meaning that I can't shake — when I'm watching a game now, I see so much emotion and humanity playing out on the field that it's like going to the opera. As Duncan writes in the book, "Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake."
