Again, the DEath Pool thread observed it, but I figure he deserves his own thread.
I didn’t read Shoeless Joe until I saw the movie, but it’s definitely worth the read. Harlan Ellison was a big fan long before it was popular.
I never read any of his other works, though.
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Note it was physician-assisted suicide.
He was older than I thought.
Loved Shoeless Joe and probably should reread it. It struck me then as a delightful mingling of themes and ideas, fantasy and reality; hope it still holds up for me x years later.
Liked some of his short stories, too, but they didn’t quite seem to reach the same level.
All in all, I liked the movie “Field of Dreams” much more than Kinsella’s novel, which contained a lot of anger, bitterness and vindictiveness that the movie managed to avoid.
Shoeless Joe is a fabulous book, but I never saw the movie. Perfect books can only make imperfect movies, and also Kevin Costner, but i digress. His very wonderful book, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, which introduced me to him, is the wildest baseball story ever imagined. They tried real hard to make it into a movie, but it’s not a clean story like Shoeless Joe. He also has a collection of short stories about a Canadian village of Inuits, who occasionally play hockey, that is fun to read. I loved the guy. I always wanted one more book.
I’ve never read the book…but I did love the movie.
All through it, I kept thinking it had to have been written by Ray Bradbury; it has a lot of Bradbury’s flavor of magic to it.
Excellent book, though I never read anything else by him. It is one of the better pairings of Book & Movie. Both are exceptional.
The movie is my favorite movie. Not the best movie, but it speaks to me. I always cry at the end.
The Field is only a couple of hours away from me, and I’ve never seen it. Last I heard it was still being maintained as a ballpark. It’s something I just gotta do some day, so I can imagine myself in that long long line of cars at the end of he movie.
This. Oh, and the movie was partly responsible for my user name. I was on a company softball team around the time the movie came out, and one guy on the team kept calling me Shoeless, no doubt mocking my complete lack of outfielding skills.
I love the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, as well as Shoeless Joe. Haven’t visited them in way too long. At the risk of sounding pedantic, as well as I’ve never considered it until right now, they both fall into a very small category-- American magical realism. Bradbury belongs there as well, good comparison. A great, wise, funny, compassionate writer. Mr. Kinsella, you will be missed.
The book of short stories (Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa) with the short story version of shoeless joe has a couple other excellent short stories, including one with an alternate history where Janis Joplin lives. I highly recommend checking it out.