Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Fiat.Luxury's Reviews:

A small book about enormous things

Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal

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Aliocha, a Russian conscript, is on a the Trans-Siberian railroad headed to his post. He, you will not be surprised to learn, does not want to go to Siberia. In his efforts to escape, defect, disappear, he meets meets Hélène, a French woman who is also trying to leave Russia. In a mere 137 pages, you witness their inner and outer worlds collide as they become accomplices despite the vast differences in age, language, and experience.  This is a short book — I read it […]

The Quick Brown Fox…

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

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Ella is a young women living on the island of Nollop, off the coast of the Southern United States. The island is named after the man who came up with the famous line, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” a pangram that up uses every letter in the alphabet once. Nollop is revered as the founder and preeminent intellectual, really second only to God in Nollopian society. One day, the letter ‘z’ comes unglued from the statue of Nollop in the middle […]

The best short story collection I’ve read in a while!

Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell

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This is a collection of short stories that really works, unlike the last one I wrote about! I don’t want to include a summary of each story, but I do want to mention my favorites: I have not stopped thinking about The Gondoliers or Orange World since putting this book down two weeks ago. In The Gondoliers, 4 sisters use echolocation (!) to navigate the waters in a presumably post-climate change world. Incredible world building, amazing character study, just all around wonderful and weird. In […]

Don’t Look Now…and some other random stories

Don't Look Now & Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

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I was several pages into the first story of this collection, the titular Don’t Look Now, when I realized that I’ve seen this movie! I remember liking the movie just fine, mostly because I love Donald Sutherland, but also thinking that the pacing and climax were a little strange and unconvincing; the horror elements were there but it didn’t quite pack a punch for me. This is also how I felt about the short story, and indeed, about this collection as a whole.  I won’t […]

Mio, My Son, an A+ read-aloud

Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren

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This is the 7th book in our read-aloud journey of 2025. (Previously featuring: The Hobbit, Travel Light, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Jenny and the Cat Club, The Dragon of Og, and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.) Astrid Lindgren is most famous for Pippi Longstocking, but I was enchanted with the cover of this little book so I decided to read this one first.  Andy is an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle in Stockholm. He is lonely and unloved, save for his neighbor […]

A punch in the gut, but make it literary

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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I expected this book to be about sexuality and Paris, in the way perhaps that A Moveable Feast is, or any of the other million Paris-based love stories. Honestly, I should have known better.  It is kind of about sexuality!  But it’s also about so many other things that by the end of the book I had stopped thinking about it as a love story at all. On the second page or so, we already know that our protagonist, David, is in Paris, but about […]



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