Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Detroit in its Heyday

An October to Remember, 1968: The Tigers-Cardinals World Series as Told by the Men Who Played It by Brendan Donley

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1968 was a fascinating and turbulent year in America, rocked by assassinations, protests, and riots. Baseball, though frequently cited as a respite from the violence and fear, was also in the midst of a sea-change and was not so far removed from the outside world. The 1968 World Series was at the precipice of all these changes. It was the last so-called “true” World Series, where the two teams earned their way into the series by winning their league’s pennant. The next year divisional playoffs […]

Shooting Stars

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

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Dragon Hoops was not only a graphic novel, but a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. And not just only any old graphic novel by him, but a First Second published one. All the big points were hit. The only thing I was not looking forward to was going to be the basketball aspect. But I figured that since Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu was not really about hockey, that maybe this was not really about basketball. Oh, it is about basketball. But it is […]

A passionate author can make all the difference

Check, Please! Book 1 #Hockey by Ngozi Ukazu

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I had seen this floating around, but it wasn’t until I saw Ngozi Ukazu speak at the NYPL professional day at New York Comic Con this year that I really wanted to read it.  I had seen the cover and thought, “Oh, hockey, not really for me,” and passed it by. But seeing Ukazu speak so passionately about her work inspired me to seek it out. (Fun fact – my public library where I work did not have it, but the high school where I […]

Homerun or Strike out?

Fuzzy Baseball V02: Ninja Baseball Blast by John Steven Gurney

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Fuzzy Baseball V02: Ninja Baseball Blast has the same fun illustrations as before (Fuzzy Baseball V01) but this second book does not hit the home run story that the first book did. John Steven Gurney, you dropped the ball, my friend. Ninja Baseball Blast starts out with a smooth pitch. You see several pages of a baseball fans baseball card collection grace the front pages. The cards are neatly put together in a sheet with each team up to bat. And then the actual story […]

A great book about two things I am terrible at: money and math. #CBRBingo – True Story

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

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Smart people who think outside the box are so much fun to read about. I read this book really fast, and it was enjoyable to read the whole way through. I’ve never read a Michael Lewis book before, but I might consider reading more now. He has a simple, clean style that is really efficient at getting his story across, and he has an instinct for the best way to use his material. And he has some great underlying material here. As he notes in […]

Baseball In Japan

You Gotta Have WA by Robert Whiting

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Growing up a big baseball fan, I always knew the sport was popular in Japan. I also always knew it was played differently but I didn’t know why. Not necessarily played differently rules-wise (though there is some of that, like ties for example), but culturally, there were different expectations of the players and the clubs. Robert Whiting smoothly lays the differences out in this book. I worry sometimes that westerners don’t always have a sensitivity to the nuanced differences in respective eastern cultures but he […]



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