Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Jake

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I love reading! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Jake's Quick Questions interview.)

Jake's Reviews:

Mediocre White Men

The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren Harding in His Times by Francis Russell

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For the last few years, I’ve had a curiosity about Warren Harding. While he was an unexceptional president, he apparently lived a very…shall we say…interesting social life. He also presided over the Teapot Dome Scandal, probably the biggest political scandal until Watergate, and his death was shrouded in mystery. When I read that James Ellroy once considered writing a fictional DC quartet with this book as a guide…well I had to get my hands on it. Holy crap was this bad. It’s tough to tell […]

Sacred Bodies

The Disabled God: Towards a Liberation Theology of Disability by Dr. Nancy L. Eisland

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Despite being a clergy person, I don’t read a lot of theology texts in my spare time. Reading is a leisure activity for me and I much prefer a good mystery or historical tome to something explicitly theological. When I do read theology, I prefer to fill the gaps in my knowledge. Disability theology is a big piece of that. I know little about disability liberation theology, even less about the Disabled Rights Movement that was and is active in the United States. When I […]

Crime Spree

Skin Deep by Sung J. Woo

The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth and the Case of Two Missing Girls by Jax Miller

Later by Stephen King

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I binged a lot of crime fiction (with one non-fictional exception) as there was a lot of traffic on my already long commute this week, allowing me to synergize eyeball reading with audio. Plus I took off the weekend so I had some extra time… Skin Deep 3 stars So rare, entertaining and enjoyable to have a transracial adoptee as a protagonist. While author Sung J. Woo doesn’t lean too hard on Siobhan’s background, he weaves it in to make her a fully realized person. The […]

Well, I’m goin’ to New Orleeeans…

Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

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This is book is something. A lot. Too much. Entertaining. Frustrating. It really runs the gamut. It would probably be easier to review it by listing the good and the bad… Good: -Deep sense of atmosphere. -Two twisty mysteries for the price of one. -Tries a lot of different genres and, for the most part, mashes them up well. -Uses art and history in an intriguing way, especially when describing the killings (I was getting Hannibal tv show vibes) -Really well-plotted for a first mystery book, especially […]

When Nothing Else Matters

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

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The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is fairly easy to describe: an alternate history mystery tale set in a Jewish colony in Alaska that’s about to be handed over to the United States. But it’s so much more. This book pays homage to the great hardboiled traditions of the past but has a big beating heart in the middle. And it also functions as a hilarious and sad commentary on Jewish life post-World War II. I’m aware of how acclaimed Michael Chabon is but I’ve not had much […]

Bayou Bengals

Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke

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When I was a kid, I used to go with my dad to visit his parents, who retired to a bayou in north Louisiana. And while north Louisiana is almost a drastically different state than south Louisiana, the flourishes of French culture combined with the marshlands, cypress trees, and petrostate aesthetic are still prevalent in that neck of the woods. So whenever I need to do some bayou reading, I look up the next David Robicheaux book from James Lee Burke. I plan on pouring […]



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