Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth…

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

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It’s hard to track the career of Margaret Atwood. She gets pinned down sometimes as a sci-fi writer, and fairly so, because of The Handmaid’s Tale and the Oryx and Crake/MadAddam trilogy. But I often forget just how good she is at strange, off-center novels that talk about contemporary life. This is a tale modeled after the fairy tale, The Robber Bridegroom, about a thief who lures young women to their doom in his forest lair. In this novel, we start with a funeral in which a group […]

That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

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I would call this book one of my white whales, and it is, but that’s a strange category given how many times I’ve read Moby-Dick. Instead, this book is my Absalom Absalom!. I was supposed to read this for a Faulkner class in college and I still have the same copy, where I stopped on page 30 and made a mark. I also still have the various underlinings I made all those years ago to fake my reading journals due with the book. I remember being called […]

This is the kind of man Boon Hogganbeck was.

The Reivers by William Faulkner

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This novel is about an older man telling his grandson about the time that he and two of his father’s help/hands run off to Memphis in a car no one wanted in 1905. It starts there and then gets pretty crazy. It’s been probably 15 years since I have read a new Faulkner. I teach As I Lay Dying from time to time in my senior class as well as “A Rose for Emily,” but this was one I had never read before. I think when […]

Shakespeare of Siberia….but not really

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov

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There is a new movie of this novella coming out sometime soon. It should be interesting. This is a relatively obscure Russian writer (at least outside of knowing circles) and I have had this book for awhile before I sat down to read this. Something is to be said about sitting down to read short stories that generally cap out at 50-100 pages. So picking up one of his novellas make more sense. As with a lot of stories, a young woman is married off […]

Wonderful stories about terrible people.

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

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Ottessa Moshfegh was nominated for the Booker Prize this year. Her novel was interesting, divisive, weird and sad. Her place is somewhere in between Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson, with some Sylvia Plath thrown in. If that makes sense to you and appeals to you, here you go. If you told me you hated this book I wouldn’t hold it against you. I wouldn’t even try to argue with you. It feels both purposely and decidedly divisive. But! If you like it, I think you’ll […]

Instead of the language being beaten out of me, I’ve tried for years to acquire it.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

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I am not sure I would recommend this book to someone as a starter for Louise Erdrich. I do think I would recommend it as an interesting journey around upper Minnesota/southern Ontario/Manitoba. And I would definitely recommend it to someone seeing a somewhat more open side of Erdrich. In this short travel narrative, Louise Erdrich travels around the physical terrain of Ojibwe Country at the intersection of Manitoba, Minnesota, and Ontario, but also in the more metaphysical world of history, language, and literature. She ruminates […]



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