Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

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A first person narrative from an AI built into a robot/android body that has been built as a line of “Artificial Friends” for kids. When Klara begins her story, she’s on display in the a specialty store mostly just trying to get noticed and also get some sun, which she slightly worships as a kind of deity-like presence, but also is her source of energy (as it ours as well). The novel then opens up a little when she meets Josie, a repeat visitor to […]

Corregidora – Gayl Jones (1975)

Corregidora by Gayl Jones

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I connect this book to Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred for a couple of reasons. For one, they’re both published by Blue Streak, with these stark cover and similar covers. So that’s a shallow reason, but it plants the seed in my mind for how they’re alike. Both books are also written in the 1970s, by Black women, and deal with a contemporary (or recent contemporary for Gayl Jones’s book) displacement and a deep discomfort with the past, especially the racial and genetic past of the […]

The Color Purple – Alice Walker (1982)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

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I think this is maybe the third or fourth time I’ve read this book. Once in college for a Black Women’s Writers course, once for a Southern Literature course, and now, and I think maybe one other time. In addition, I’ve read the sequel (Possessing the Secret of Joy), which carries on especially the conversation about FGM that this book gets into with the Nettie in Africa sections. This particular time, I listened to Alice Walker reading the book for an audio edition (which involves […]

The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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I read and reread the first page of this book several times before I finally powered through a little. The opening page is dense and intriguing, but it also clearly portends an immersive, intense, and bleak novel. It’s also clearly a complex novel (not very much like we tend to get these days). Our narrator is a double (or triple?) agent writing a kind of confession. An adherent to Ho Chi Minh Communism and the North Vietnamese war efforts, but also a mole in the […]

Wild Cards – George R. R. Martin et al (1986)

Wild Cards by George R. R. Martin et al

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From my understanding this book began as a kind of RPG tabletop game (as in being written as they went) and it developed into this series of connected short stories. This is an expanded edition of the original collection, which has some additional stories written as late as 2010. The premise involves an alien culture landing on Earth and among their technology is a kind of virus while has a couple of possible effects on those who get it: death, transformation to a kind of […]

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas – Larry McMurtry (1968)

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas by Larry McMurtry

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I’ve been slowly making my way through Larry McMurty’s writing for a few years now. So this is the most recent book of his I’ve read, and the book that is closest to his death from this past week. He was in his 80s and lived a fruitful life in a lot of ways. He spent a lot of his life writing books, working in Hollywood, and working in the rare and used book market. His personal views and memoirs are well-documented as well. This […]



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