Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

“that mixture of the rational and the visceral that one commonly finds throughout human history”

Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA by Richard English

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CBR Bingo: History I’ve been doing a lot of Irish fiction and poetry over the past couple years, and informative as both of those can be about the past, sometimes you just need to read some history, too. So I have been picking my way through this fairly exhaustive history of the IRA from its early days in Ireland’s revolutionary decade up through the immediate post-Troubles era. And between everything else I was juggling, it took me a solid six months to finish this one, […]

“It’s harder to come back than it is to arrive”

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

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CBR Bingo Square: Violence Maddeningly, I now don’t know what put Dorothy Hughes’s 1947 noir In a Lonely Place on my radar. (I thought it was Susan Straight’s 1001-book literary map of America, but…apparently not?) All I know is that I am a sucker for A) mystery novels, and B) novels about my home state, and what reliably ticks both boxes? Noir. And Dorothy Hughes was a new discovery for me, which made this novel all the more appealing. Also, deliciously, In a Lonely Place isn’t a […]

“it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things”

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Oops, it’s been a hot minute since I wrote a review. I have been reading, but I also spent four months trying to do my job and also angst about whether I would still have that job in the fall, which ate up a lot of my focus. (I do! I got tenure!) Then I went traveling and continued not writing reviews, though also still reading quite a bit. But CBR Bingo is a nice little prod to get back to it, in the back half of […]

“every death is significant, even when every life appears not to be”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

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I am exhausted: extremely jet-lagged and just submitted materials for my first major deadline of 2023. So what better to do than to review the last book I read in 2022 (finished at approximately 9:30 PM on New Year’s Eve, yes I know how to party), the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida? 2022 was actually my best year when it comes to attacking the Booker longlist; I read three of the nominees, and all of them were really excellent novels, in extremely divergent ways. […]

matrimony, murder, and black market mischief in post-war London

The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair

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CBR Bingo: Series (Sparks & Bainbridge Mysteries #1) I needed some new, lighter mysteries to get me through the dwindling days of early autumn. This popped up in my library recommendations, and since there’s a few of them to work through, I figured I’d give it a try. While there’s no shortage of books set during WWII, there are fewer that actually work through the aftermath of the war, which is its own very distinctive setting. The war is over and won, but London is still in tatters […]

“I want you to see me. That’s why I shine like this.”

Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa

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CBR Bingo: Recommended When I was in the early days of my summer of Irish fiction, I visited a couple friends in DC and one of them passed off her copy of this novel to me. “When you get a moment, I think you’ll like it. It’s an easy read, but not a dumb one–more like where you feel better at the end of it.” Since I read plenty of serious and/or bleak stuff, I’m always grateful for a recommendation like that, but it took me […]



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