Book Twentytwo: Cardboard Gods

Cardboard Gods, Josh Wilker



Good things: This book is gorgeous. The cover is lovely, the pages feel great in your hands, the reproductions of the baseball cards the start each chapter are terrific. The gimmick is catchy: Mr. Wilker uses a particular baseball card from his collection as a jumping off point to tell a story from his childhood. The stories he tells are often touching and sad or funny and silly.

Bad things: Too many run-on sentences (parentheticals [inside parentheticals]--contained by em dashes--and so on), making this a clunky read. I also wonder who this is really for. I feel like he assumes you know as much about baseball as he does, which I don't, which led me to honestly believe throughout most of the book that Bucky Dent really was killed in a freak wood chipper accident. And there are parts where he goes into deep baseball-speak, which for me translated into the Peanuts adult voice, "Wah wah wah waah wahhh, wah wah wah." But on the other hand, it seems to me that there's not really enough here about baseball itself to make it a compelling read for the serious baseball fan, since the real story is about the author and his unconventional family. You know, classic memoir stuff.

Mostly, not bad, fine for a book club pick, but not really great either.