Read for Cannonball Run Bingo. Category: White Whale. The World Cup was on this past summer and anytime I see it, I’m inclined to read more books about soccer. I’m a big sports fan but my interest in soccer really only begun about 12 years ago when, bored out of my mind for the summer of 2006, I watched the World Cup fastidiously. Soccer is now perhaps my fourth favorite sport after baseball, football, and basketball and I’m wearing a New York City FC shirt […]
Throwing a kitten out a window was only a warning shot.
Halfway through Moonglow, I caught myself with my hand over my mouth, trying to keep my breath inside my body because the prose was so exceptionally beautiful. I had my worries before reading this book. I have only recently discovered Chabon, and have only otherwise read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which was so stunning that it made me want to punch something. There is a lot of hype surrounding Moonglow, and even I only got it by accident from the library on a strict, one […]
Oy Gestalt
Chances are that, if you are reading this or any other website concerned with popular culture, you have little more than a passing familiarity with ultra-orthodox Judaism. Like most fundamentalist sects, they mostly keep to themselves. They rarely make the news except for when their behaviour becomes excessive somehow – excessively strict, like when some Rebbe or other gets into hot water for forbidding women Jewish and non-Jewish alike to walk across a public sidewalk or tries to ban children from attending school because their […]
Jesus could tell one helluva knock-knock joke.
I borrowed this from a co-worker almost two years ago, and it took me three attempts to get through it. I think that is less a product of this book’s merit, and a more a result of the reading interests I’ve had since it was placed in my hands. I always had something else that interested me, so this kept moving further and further down my list. Zealot is, I think, pretty clearly the most controversial book I’ve read for CBR. Shortly after publication, I […]