If you're not either a fan of magical realism (think Gabriel Garcia Márquez) or a serious old-time baseball head, you may well not like this book. (Fan of one or the other but not necessarily both? Your chances of liking the book improve.)

Protagonist Gideon Clarke, a man with a footloose and wandering wife and a monomania about an amateur baseball league that may or may not have existed and their mythical all-star game against the 1908 Chicago Cubs, comes adrift in time and finds himself transplanted into the time and place where the game really was played, in pouring rain for a Biblical forty days and nights (2,614 innings, for those of you at home keeping score—breaks for meals and darkness allowed).

Who won the game? Did Gideon's here-again-gone-again wife come home? What was the Dark Angel's overall batting average? I'll cheat and tell you that last one—the Angel played about .300 ball—but for the rest of it you'll have to read this wondermous fantasy on the Game. ( )

Shoeless Joe is more famous and popular, but I love this surreal novel which involves time travel, mystic visions, and a 40-day baseball game (with a stone angel in the outfield!). ( )

4194 The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by W. P. Kinsella (read 26 July 2006) I read Shoeless Joe last month and really liked it though it was fantasy--which usually turns me off (I have, e.g., NO desire to read Harry Potter). This Kinsella book is fantasy gone wild, with a 40 day baseball game beginning July 4, 1908 between the Chicago Cubs of Tinker to Evers to Chance fame and the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-stars which goes on for 2614 innings. I could not get caught up by it as I did by Shoeless Joe and the field of dreams, and it was so improbable and silly and pointless that I was glad when I got to the last page. ( )