Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

When Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

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This is a 1982 novel by Anne Tyler, who wrote The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons among two dozen or so other novels. She keeps cropping in Laura Lippman novel in terms of being another Baltimore writer who narrates a much more domestic version of middle class life in the city. And since she’s written so many books and used copies are everywhere (including in Little Free Libraries and other places) she’s pretty easy to lock down. In this novel, we begin with Pearl Tull, an older […]

She got to the parking lot earlier than usual.

Out by Natsuo Kirino

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I read a previous novel by Katsuo Kirino, Real World, and among other things I found that book to be a little weird and experimental in form and style. I had a more or less lukewarm feeling about it. This book is a little more straightforward as a crime thriller. The novel begins at a food production facility preparing what the novel calls (or at least translates to) a lunchbox factory–I imagine worrying that “bento” wouldn’t make sense to English language readers. Anyway, we’re at the […]

Amma is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city, a few early morning barges cruise slowly by

Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo

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This is a highly recommended book for both this site, and more readers in wider circles. This novel shared the Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which is a book I didn’t particularly like at all, so the idea of it sharing this prize is especially galling to me. That said, there’s a kind of funny irony about Margaret Atwood, perhaps as a stand-in for “white feminism”, co-opting the celebration of this novel–a multi-voiced, multi-generational, highly-intelligent, Queer, witty, sympathetic, portrayal of twelve–mostly Black women–characters in […]

It was a long drive and Eve cried most of the way home, because the big day hadn’t gone the way that she’d hoped…

Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta

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I didn’t look up any criticism on this book, but if I had to guess it’s probably cited from both sides as either: going too far or not going too far enough! This book is primarily told through the voices of Eve Fletcher, a single mom in her forties, who in the opening chapter of the book drops her son off at his dorm on his first day ever of college. The day is fraught because he woke up extremely hung over and in the […]

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in 1910, at the age of nineteen.

Stoner by John Williams

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This is a reread from a few years ago, so part of my review will be reconsidering or readdressing my previous thoughts on this novel. This is the third novel by the writer John Williams, whose first two books Nothing but the Night and Butcher’s Crossing, I reviewed the other week. This book begins in 1910, as you can see from the opening line, as a farmer’s son enters into the University of Missouri to begin a course of study in the agriculture school, only to discover that he […]

“It was in my hair, Severian, ” Dorcas said.

Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

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The third book of the series and this is probably the one that I most enjoyed so far because it was somewhat looser in its narration and storytelling and more confident in the story itself. Severian and Dorcas are now setting off on a kind of new adventure, having finally dispatched the previous quests, and we are seeing a kind of return or a turning back to the beginning as the story is looping back to where we began. I foolishly looked at the premise […]



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