Books: June, Dreams, 4th of July

Books bought:
None. I bought no books. I did find two Klostermans on a stoop in the Slope. I'm meandering through one of those. I went to E. Village books a couple times to check the price again on Big Rock Candy Mountain, an early Stegner, hoping it would come down from $8, which seems too expensive even though it's the price of a coffee in this city.

Books read:
Magic Time, W.P. Kinsella.

The only book I read this month was the Kinsella that I found in my building's trash. Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe, which inspired Field of Dreams. Magic Time is essentially the same book written twenty years later, with typos and other touches of senility. A young man moves to a small town in Iowa to play for the town's semipro baseball team. He finds a job, falls in love, and discovers that something magical has happened. I missed the big reveal and the last twenty pages of the book when I left it in Chicago. I read enough to make me want to live in Iowa, or at least to involve magic in the pursuit of my own dreams.

Field of Dreams is about having faith that good things will happen when you embrace uncertainty to do what you care most about. If you build it, they will come. As much as I'd like to play semipro baseball in Iowa in 1910, I have another dream, one that I'm really pursuing. I want to use the law to fight for health rights for people on the margins. This dream is ambitious. At most, a few hundred lawyers across the country get to focus on this work. There are 700 players in Major League Baseball. My path involves uncertainty and faith that something good will happen.

So it's the 4th of July and everything feels so American. The Supreme Court is making perplexing decisions, the Mariners aren't scoring any runs, Bushwick is alight with redundant fireworks, and this feels just about right.