Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Archives for December 2021

Expect the Unexpected with the Manga Cookbook

Manga Cookbook by Annonymus

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It’s always a fun surprise with Book Exchange, but this year one of my books came with a second extra surprise. Manga Cookbook appears on the surface to be a cookbook based on manga as in Japanese graphic novels given both the title and the cover illustrations. However…… It turns out that “manga” is also an Indian word for “mango”, and it is this definition which is intended. Nearly all of the recipes feature some sort of mango. I say ‘some sort’ because I do […]

Thank you, llamareadsbooks!

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Thank you, llamareadsbooks!  Emmalita’s review got me quite interested in Sword, Stone, Table: Old Legends, New Voices since I’ve always liked Arthurian myths and retellings.  As I’m working on improving the diversity of the voices I read, this anthology of “gender-bent, race-bent, LGTQIA+ inclusive retellings” from a diverse group of authors will help with that.  I’m looking forward to reading this next year 🙂 Giving and receiving books is the best way to celebrate the holidays!  Merry Book Exchange!

The smell of hospitals in winter And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters

The Road through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

Selected Prose of TS Eliot by TS Eliot

The Burden of Southern History by C Vann Woodward

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The Road through the Wall A novel that reminds me of what I’ve always known, that American suburbs are deeply rotten states. Shirley Jackson earned her fame by writing about small towns, but this novel published around the same time of the The Lottery story collection is a reminder, along with most of those stories, that all parts of the US have a deep cultural rot to them that is not housed in specific places. Those places just have their own flavors. The novel takes […]

My Struggle Part five (Some Rain Must Fall) – Karl Ove Knausgard (2010)

My Struggle Part Five by Karl Ove Knausgard

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For the UK title:   This fifth volume of Knausgard’s novel closely picks up after the fourth. Here we find young Karl Over in love with a girl who he has spent exactly 20 minutes with. They will both be students in Bergen in the fall when she begins university and he begins a one-year writing course. He’s 19 and fresh off his teaching job in the country. He’s only 19, so the writing course seems to be a big deal and he definitely feels […]

The Plague – Albert Camus (1947)

The Plague by Albert Camus

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I can’t imagine that anyone who read this novel before 2020 was very much surprised at what came next. This is a novel about plague reaching an Alergian port city, carried by the fleas that inhabit rats. Dead rats start showing up in tremendous numbers around the city, and even though the evidence is clear, the city is small to move on precautions that will save lives. Our narrator is watching this occur and this novel is presented almost as commentary and reportage on the […]

The Fixer – Bernard Malamud (1966)

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

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This is simply one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read. Like a lot of books, this book is a reminder that the whole world’s been a dystopia depending on who you are. Yakov Bok is a handyman in Kiev. He’s been not exactly passing as gentile to work in a specific neighborhood so much as allowing his unquestioned Jewishness to remain unquestioned. One day is picked up by the police and accused of murdering a local boy and draining his body of all […]



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