According to a brief statement made by his literary agent, Carolyn Swayze, Kinsella’s death was doctor-assisted. The Canadian author passed away on September 16 at age 81. I’m burying the lede here for the same reason that I can’t bring myself to finish the last chapter of Shoeless Joe : I don’t want W.P. Perhaps it’s in the way Eddie Scissons preaches the word of baseball, holding church on the left field bleachers of Ray’s field - “looking,” Kinsella writes, “for all the world like an Old Testament prophet on the side of a mountain.” Here, among dead ballplayers and living ballplayers and feverish fans and acres of corn, baseball manages to transcend its ninth-inning narratives and pennant chases, becoming something sacred and timeless. Salinger, desperate to help them realize their dreams of experiencing the game one last time. Perhaps it’s in the way Ray Kinsella doggedly pursues other ballplayers and fans, including a reclusive J.D.

It probably comes as little surprise that Field of Dreams quickly climbed the ranks of my favorite baseball films when I first got into the sport, too, but there’s something about its source material that speaks to me on a deeper level. Like its more famous film adaptation, Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe is a story to sink into, one that reflects the marriage of baseball with our constant grasping for some scrap of childhood nostalgia, some piece of the past, some fulfillment of our desire to see the underdog vindicated, if only as a spectre in an Iowan cornfield.

There are books you devour and then there are books you savor. The faint pencil marking above the first of many sponsored accolades says that I purchased the novel for two dollars, which, when I picture the mom-and-pop bookshop I used to frequent in my hometown, feels about right.

It’s a cheap paperback I carried with me when I moved from Seattle to San Francisco, one corner crumbling, a stranger’s name etched in blue ink on the inside cover. I pulled Shoeless Joe off my bookshelf last night.

Shoeless joe jackson kinsella