Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Love is desire sustained by unfulfillment.”

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

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While I like to think of myself as generally well-read there are definite gaps in the more classic authors of certain genres. Authors I enjoy, including Neil Gaiman, have pointed to Angela Carter as an immense influence on their own work. Thankfully someone had gifted The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories to me a few years ago. The stories in the collection share a theme of being closely based upon fairytales or folk tales and Carter toys with Gothic fiction and gender, utilizing classic Gothic […]

I release the lock. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love.

The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

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This is a collection of short stories from Samantha Hunt and one that I’ve been avoiding because I was worried it was going to be another delving into the kinds of modern fairy tale stories that I end up always wanting to the read but never really enjoy much. I think I can be forgiven for thinking that’s what we were going to have here, because of how many of those that have been published in recent years. Anyway, instead, most of these stories are […]

She misses believing in God.

Florida by Lauren Groff

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Florida (2018) by Lauren Groff was strongly recommended to me by my boyfriend. He was surprised I hadn’t heard of it, and I probably should have. It was a National Book Award Finalist and on NPR’s Best Books of 2018 List. I read the first part of the first story on his iPad and was interested enough to read the rest of the book. Short stories are not my go-to. Most of the time I have a hard time connecting to the characters before the next story begins […]

Have you lost your mind? Experienced religion? Or any other dreadful thing?

Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Treasury by Louisa May Alcott

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I love Christmas. As my kid says, there are more holiday songs on my “Holly Jolly” play list than there are days in the year. I bake an insane number of cookies and start watching Christmas movies in November. Yep, I am one of those people and I’m not sorry about it. When I was around 9, I got a paperback anthology of Christmas stories. To keep myself occupied until everyone else woke up on Christmas morning (I was the only kid in the house at the […]

Wounds Laid Bare

Drifting House by Krys Lee

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A collection of short stories, this book takes a look at Korea in the last 70 years, by exploring the impact of events like the Korean War and its aftermath, the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee, the famine in North Korea, or the IMF Crisis. Lee does this by examining the plight of ordinary people whose lives are inescapably governed by circumstances mostly out of their control. Some of the stories are pretty heavy stuff in that the protagonists find themselves in horrific situations where their […]

The Monsters are the Heroes

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin

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Back when I was a kid, I loved reading about Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. I read about them in grade school and then, while taking Latin in high school, I read even more. Our copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology got quite a work out. But then, I moved on to other interests and pretty much forgot about mythology until recently, when people like novelist Madeline Miller and translator Emily Wilson have put the gods and goddesses back on my radar. Wake, Siren is […]



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