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:

“The failure to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of all persons has lurked at the root of every racial caste system”

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

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This will be a short review, as I cannot do justice to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This brilliant and searing book has given me so much to think about, that I can’t sort it into a neat review at this time. This is a book that I will be thinking about for months, if not years. The New Jim Crow traces the formation of racial caste in the United States, from slavery to Jim Crow to […]

Enjoyable Murder

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

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Anthony Horowitz’s The Word is Murder is so much fun. Its conceit is that Horowitz himself is a character. He is solicited to write a book about an unfolding murder by an ex-cop named Hawthorne. Hawthorne is Sherlock Holmes-ian in that he can deduce amazing things from small details. Hawthorne was let go from the police force for an incident he doesn’t go into, but is still hired as a consultant for hard-to-crack murders. In this case, the murder victim is Diana Cowper. She visits […]

Frank Novel about Sex, Class, Nature, and Industrial Decay

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

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Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in 1928, is an explicit account of married Lady Connie Chatterley and her groundskeeper lover, Oliver Mellors. Mellors’s name is almost never used in the book; he is simply the groundskeeper, even in Connie’s mind. Connie is married to Clifford Chatterley, who was paralyzed below the waist in World War […]

Hippy Shenanigans Colorful Characters Dope and Crime

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

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Although it’s been many years since I read it, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve read a few other books of his and generally enjoy the psychedelic, conspiratorial, convoluted style. Inherent Vice is absolutely in this vein, but by the end I was thoroughly bored and wondering what the meandering point was supposed to be. The story follows Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pothead hippy private investigator who seems to get hired by everyone in […]

Better than the Last Book

Dark Tower III: The Wastelands by Stephen King

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I had a hard time with Stephen King’s Dark Tower II book, The Drawing of the Three. His depiction of one of the Black characters really bothered me. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands continued to have a little of the same problem, when the reintegrated character’s “dark side” occasionally emerges, speaking like a character out of Gone with the Wind. But that was kept to a minimum, so that alone made me like this book better. The Waste Lands is a continuation of […]

A Brisk Thriller

Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

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I enjoyed ElCicco’s review of Gillian McAllister’s Famous Last Words and promptly put it on my TBR list. Camille is a book editor with a husband, Luke, and a new daughter Polly. On her first day back at work after maternity leave, she is contacted by police: her husband has taken three people hostage at a nearby warehouse. Needless to say, Camille is deeply shocked. She is even more shaken when her husband kills two of the hostages and then disappears. The hostage negotiator on […]



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