Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Rich language and culture

Spanish Is the Language of My Family by Michael Genhart

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I assumed that Spanish Is the Language of My Family would take the format of “this is my family, and we speak Spanish” and then a list of wonderful Spanish words such as an alphabet book might give or beginning Spanish words would be given. Well, we get the wonderful words, but also a bit more. There is a spelling bee and a history lesson on how many children (we will learn from the 1930s to 1960s) that were not allowed to speak Spanish outside […]

I’m not ashamed to say, I didn’t get it.

Water Look Away by Bob Hicok

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CBR15Passport  author I only give Water Look Away a one as the book was not for me. I wish that I could put in two ratings, one rating for me (a one) and a three for the potential for someone else. Maybe this book by Bob Hicok was too sophisticated for my personal reading tastes. Or maybe the subject just was not for me. Either way I was just unable to really get into the poetry. The biggest issue I had was that the poems […]

“We meet people, they will transform us.”

Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe

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I loved this book. Toya Wolfe did an amazing job creating a vivid world in this coming-of-age story set in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago in the 1990s. This was the era in which many public housing projects were being torn down, and this story is told within that context of fear and uncertainty. (I had watched The Pruitt-Igoe Myth years ago and it’s just a wonderful documentary if you want a depiction of the complexities of urban housing post WWII and the use […]

One way to deal with sexism in your office

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

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  CBR15 Passport – set in Japan Shibata is a lonely office worker, doing a rather forgettable job for a paper products company. In her office – and maybe in yours, too – she’s one of the only women, and so in addition to her job she is also expected to do tasks such as bring snacks to her colleagues when vendors gift them to the office, provide coffee at meetings and also clean the cups after meetings. One day, tired of being called “Cup?”, […]

“They lead ‘still’ lives, waiting.”

Still Life by Louise Penny

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My husband and I started watching the Three Pines series on Amazon Prime, which was enjoyable; Chief Inspector Gamache, played by Alfred Molina, is a delight of eyebrows. The television series reminded me that I likely hadn’t read Ms. Penny’s earlier works though I have picked up the occasional book in an airport bookstore but have moved haphazardly through the series; thus, I decided to start at the first book. Sill Life draws Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec to the delightfully bucolic […]

House hunters

Where Can We Go?: A Tale of Four Bears by Dai Yun

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  CBR15Passport country  Some days you are the book and some days you are the fly that gets swatted by the book. Or in other words, this book was flat for me. Where Can We Go?: A Tale of Four Bears had such potential. I was hoping for a folktale, or something humorous, by Dai Yun (adapted by Helen Mixter). But instead, it is just about these bears who move into the human world (who seems to find them rude and more annoying than anything […]



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