The baseball season is over for my beloved...

The baseball season is over for my beloved Chicago Cubs, who suffered ignominious defeat in an NL Wild Card series against San Diego. I’ll be honest: it got to me a little, to have the season end that way. I had been daydreaming about Pete Crow-Armstrong delivering something memorable in the playoffs, to cap a pretty ridiculous MVP run in the regular season. I guess that’ll have to wait until next year. My malaise was helped a little by the news that a new Chad Harbach novel is arriving soon. His debut, The Art of Fielding (2011), is a delightful book about baseball and belonging; I had started to think perhaps it was the only one he would ever publish. Then a friend (and fellow fan of The Art…) messaged to ask whether I’d heard the news: The Brightness arrives in a few short weeks’ time. I did little more than glance at the synopsis, but that was enough to learn that the new novel shares the same setting as the first. Whether or not it features many of the same characters, or has…