Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

My friend wrote a book and it’s really good! Why did it take me so long to read it?

Hot Rabbi by Aviva Blakeman

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CBR14 Bingo: Hot (hot features in the title, and a lot of the contents are also decidedly spicy) Official book description: For fifteen years, Shoshana Goldman has avoided her childhood synagogue. Her successful custom-furniture store keeps her busy enough, and the synagogue brings bad memories not peace. It will take nothing short of a minor miracle to change her mind. Intrigued by her friends’ convictions that the new “hot Rabbi” is that minor miracle, Shoshana agrees to attend a service. It’s only one service, right? […]

Finding Home

Yossel’s Journey by Kathryn Lasky

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Yossel’s Journey seems like, at first blush, that it will be a typical Jewish family immigrates to America. And while the characters of Kathryn Lasky’s latest picture book (due in September 2022), leave Russia due to the pogroms of the 1880s, and stop for a spell in New York where things are familiar (houses brush up against each other, you can smell the food your neighbors are cooking), they do not stay. They travel by wagon to the Southwest where they run a trading store, […]

Big Ideas and Big Friends

Big Dreams, Small Fish by Paula Cohen

Gibberish by Young Vo

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Culture is an interesting subject. And when you come from one and go to a different one, things get interesting.  The publisher Levine Querido has stories that are about cultures we may/may not be familiar with. In the process of reading them, there is a lot to learn about how we are not only different, but the same, too. Shirley is a child with big ideas, her family are immigrants, they live over their grocery store, and they cannot sell their gefilte fish. Her parents […]

We’re all so f*cked

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

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It took me ages to finish this book. Not because I had troubles reading it, the language in this is in fact incredibly fluid, I would even say that German prose hardly gets better than this. It took me so long because the dawning realisation that people don’t change, they don’t ever change, is a lot to bear. The sheer relatability of this upset me to the core and it should reach so many more people. The World of Yesterday is the memoir of Stefan […]

You are bound to find something that speaks to you

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Bound is one of the shortest books I have probably ever read. The longest poem is several pages long, but it is just a bunch of blacked out text. It is called (black box). I cannot put the symbol here as it is literally the black box/line that is used to block out wording in important documents. I am assuming this is the real speech of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I will call this poem “IPMBN” just to make it easier. If this is […]

To run a shtinker, you have to see the broken heart inside the deadest pan.

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My first Chabon! OOOOOOF. WOW. Holy crap, you guys, did you know that his prose is exceptional and that there’s no exposition, and that he creates an utterly believable alternate timeline and a narrative that ramps up until you’re flying down the other side of the rollercoaster with no brakes? Are they all like this? Is my brain going to melt? How have I missed out this my entire adult life? Full disclosure: it took me a really long time to gather momentum with “The […]



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