Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, In my corrupted blood.”

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro

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The bile, the fire, the vitriol; do we understand now what King Lear meant when he assaulted his eldest daughter with these words? I certainly did not. I took it as an insult, sure, but I did not know the deeper meaning. Recently, I was driving to work and I heard James Shapiro on NPR. He was a guest because, despite the fact that he was promoting his latest title, a lot of people have been making a lot of headway with the statement that […]

Don’t Nix this one from your to read pile. #obviouspun

The Nix by Nathan Hill

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As I saw the saw my Goodreads Reading challenge accusatorily tell me how many books I am behind right now (6!!) I panic searched for something I could do via audio while going on my many social distancing walks. This came up on my local library app as “available now” and a cursory search showed me that folks I like had it in their to read piles, so on I went. Once again, I found myself unknowingly entering a book set in Chicago (where I […]

“We all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.”

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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There is a lot to say about Shakespeare, but there is not a lot to know. Bill Bryson, everyone’s favorite kindly uncle, lays the facts bare while gently chiding all of the (mostly bonkers) “hopeful suppositions” that have been presented as facts by well-meaning and often obsessed fans, historians, and scholars. Bryson, himself an acolyte at the altar of Shakespeare, paints a bright and brisk portrait of the man that we know to be Shakespeare. We know very few things about him; there are only […]

These two people just genuinely like each other so much.

Get a Life, Chloe Brown (The Brown Sisters, #1) by Talia Hibbert

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This was just such a good, happy reading experience, and the audio made it better. I am once again about a month behind my reviews, because it took me so long to write my review for Docile, so this one will be short and sweet. I basically adored this book. I’ve never read Talia Hibbert before, but you can bet I’ll be checking out her entire backlist now. This book was swoony and romantic, smart and compassionate, and funny! It’s so rare to find a […]

It was fine!

You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe

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The title is fun! The cover is cheeky! The opening quote from Brad Neely’s beloved “Washington” video was greatly appreciated! It seemed like we were off to the races, but then… … … it got awkward. I listened to this as an audio book. The performance was fine, but the layout of the opening was just a mess. It probably worked better on paper, but the book started with ten minutes of list-reading. Then a prologue. Then an introduction. Then more list reading. I found […]

Who Can Truly Know Her When There Are No Others Of Her Kind?

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathon Snipes

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Rivers Solomon’s The Deep is a beautiful and gut wrenching novella. At this current time, I don’t think I could have read it if I hadn’t listened to Daveed Diggs’ narration. Diggs and his fellow clppng’s William Hutson and Jonathon Snipes, hold author credits because the novella is based a song they wrote, commissioned by NPR’s This American Life for “We Are in the Future” an episode about Afrofuturism. Clppng’s song was an homage to Detroit’s Drexciya who imagined an underwater utopia created by the […]



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