Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About esmemoria

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Eager to get back on the horse this year! In my walking around life, I miss my old, blind pug (the Ancient Mariner), help amazing college students become teachers, and tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: esmemoria's Quick Questions interview.)

esmemoria's Reviews:

Excellent Suspense Stories Featuring Women

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives by ed. Sarah Weinman

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I was wandering the used bookstore, as you do, and made a beeline for the mystery anthologies section. I was in the middle of reading a weighty tome (And the Band Played On) so I thought I’d mix it up with lighter fare. I bought Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, edited by Sarah Weinman. It turned out not to be your standard mysteries, but more in line with what the book calls “domestic suspense.” And it was superb. The book is a collection of twelve short […]

And the Band Played On

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts

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The numbers of AIDS cases measured the shame of the nation….The United States, the one nation with the knowledge, the resources, and the institutions to respond to the epidemic, had failed. And it had failed because of ignorance and fear, prejudice and rejection. The story of the AIDS epidemic was that simple….it was a story of bigotry and what it could do to a nation. I moved from New York to San Francisco in 1990, when I was 21 years old. I vividly remember sitting […]

Ursula Le Guin is a Bad Ass

The Wild Girls by Ursula Le Guin

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The Wild Girls is a small collection of writings by Ursula Le Guin, as well as one interview. I enjoyed this book enormously and it’s a quick read. The first piece is a short story from which the collection gets its name. The Crown men, the elite denizens of a nearby city, kidnap children of the “dirt people,” otherwise known as slaves. They steal a little girl named Mal, whose sister Modha chases after them until she’s caught up with the cadre of soldiers. Among […]

Loss, Race, and Self Determination

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

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This book is, among many other things, about grief and loss, and about women unwilling to diminish their desires to live full and complex lives. – Author Danielle Evans I didn’t know anything about Danielle Evans’s book The Office of Historical Corrections when I bought it, but I loved the title. The book is a series of short stories and one novella. Although I earned my MFA in short fiction, I have discovered I don’t really like to read short story collections that much. Not […]

An Odyssey Through Horror and Sanctuary

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was the kind of five star read that made me adjust the rating of an earlier review, because I realized Whitehead’s book was so much stronger. So I went back and re-ranked the previous book as four stars–still very good, but not the same experience. The Underground Railroad follows Cora, a slave during the pre-Civil War era. In the beginning of the book, Cora is a slave on a large plantation. Her mother Mabel was the only slave on the […]

I Only Understood a Third of this Book but I Still Liked It

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

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Everything I’ve read by Albert Camus I have loved, and it is the same for The Myth of Sisyphus, only a portion of which I probably understood. From the back of the book: “[T]he essay presents a meditation on suicide–the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning.” As I understand it, in this book/essay, Camus uses the term “absurd” to mean the meaninglessness of the universe. It is through the acknowledgement of this absurdity that the limits of […]



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