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:

A Sugar Spun Fantasy

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

by 9 Comments

I don’t normally use the word exquisite to describe a book, but Erin Morgenstern’s book The Night Circus is exquisite. Thanks to the generous Ale, who sent me this book for the holiday book exchange, I got to read one of my favorite books of the year. The Night Circus is about two talented enchanters, Celia and Marco, who have been brought up since childhood to engage in a mysterious challenge with each other. Both take part in creating the night circus, a magical circus […]

Columbine

Columbine by Dave Cullen

by 2 Comments

When I first saw the cover of Dave Cullen’s Columbine, it filled me with dread. The picture of the exterior of the school stretches across the lower part of the cover, while the rest of the image is nothing but a wide expanse of overcast sky. The cover is blank and cold. Some of my reaction is, of course, attributed to knowing what happened at Columbine. But there is something particularly hopeless about the cover image. Columbine is about the 1999 mass school shooting perpetrated […]

How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This

A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib

by 6 Comments

I love poetry, and am hopeless at both understanding and explaining it. TS Eliot said “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” I love the words and rhythms and feeling, but I don’t always understand a poem in its entirety. So I apologize in advance for not being able to say anything sophisticated about Hanif Abdurraqib’s astonishing book of poetry, A Fortune for Your Disaster. Abdurraquib is a Black poet who writes with great fierceness and beauty about the Black experience, freedom, confinement, death, […]

Sometimes You Just Get Tired

Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay

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I feel like I should apologize for so many “meh” reviews as of late. I guess I’m in a grouchy reader phase (ever have one of those?) But I’m glad Alex Finlay’s Every Last Fear won’t be the book with which I finish my cannonball. I dunno, I’m just tired of half-assed thrillers written by mediocre writers. I love mysteries, suspense novels and thrillers. I’ve read a lot of good ones and some bad ones. But the novels that depress me the most are the […]

Let’s Get Silly!

Archie: Volume One by Fiona Staples et. al.

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I can’t even believe I’m reviewing this. I’m going to have to streeeeeetch my words out because what is there to say about Archie that hasn’t been said for decades? Archie is the star of Riverdale High. Girls love him. Guys want to be him. He plays the guitar and women swoon. He loves down-to-earth Betty but is swept up by the foxy Veronica. Jughead eats burgers. Reggie is a creep. What else is there to say? Nothing new, really, but the book Archie, Volume […]



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