Many little gems in this book of short personal essays. However, unlike Keret's brilliant short fictions, I felt like a few of these essays were really crying out for a longer form. Made me kind of wistful. Perhaps I just always wish that the true stories of our lives could be longer...that we had a little more time to explore and search for meaning...

Another world-class Ira Glass rec. Love love loved all of these stories; reading them was like listening to a close personal friend

I really like this essay collection because Keret packs a lot into very few words, which is my favorite style of writing. Each essay is more like a vignette, and they're tiny slices of Keret's life during the first seven years of his son's life. They often express "[s]omething about the almost desperate human need to find good in the least likely places." (From one of my favorites in this collection, "Long View.") This is especially poignant since the author lives in a place where air raids are frequent so parents have to think of games to keep their children from being scared ("Pastrami") or think about military service when their kids are only toddlers ("Throwdown at the Playground"). There's a lovely essay where the author tries to set a good example for his son of de-escalation ("What Does the Man Say"), and it made me think about Pankaj Mishra's recent Guardian article on the crisis in modern masculinity and rethinking what it means to be a good man. The essays never get preachy though, and at this moment in my life, I can definitely relate to being exhausted by "working toward family and regional peace."

There are also some fun essays about his travels to different countries for book tours, and I like the way he views long-haul flights ("Flight Meditation"). He's got some quirky family members. There's a sweet essay about his brother ("Idol Worship"). I learned that apparently there's a genre of Israeli pop music that are dirges for a friend who's gone religious (?!) in the essay about his sister who discovered religion during her adult life ("My Lamented Sister"), and the story of how his parents met ("Love at First Whiskey") is also pretty amusing.