The Brothers K by David James Duncan

This was a Christmas present from my son. He told me I was always recommending books to him and he wanted to recommend a book he loves to me. A very sweet idea! This book is set in the Pacific NW, the story of a family of three brothers and two sisters. The father is a minor league baseball pitcher and coach. From the title, the author intends some kind of parallel to the Brothers Karamazov and certainly the themes of religion and family are there. But in an interesting twist, Duncan uses baseball as a metaphor for just about everything. He looks at all the big issues, religion, love, family, purpose, war, politics with this theme. It's a fascinating book with some very clever ideas. My only criticism is that there is a lot of wandering off on side stories/issues that don't really advance anything. But he has drawn very interesting characters and I definitely enjoyed it.