Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sometimes, you just have to suck it up and write the damned review

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

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I’ve put off this review far too long, and though I could just skip it, I don’t want to punk out when the reviewing gets tough. I really wanted to like Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees, as it came highly recommended and was written by an African lesbian, a voice I haven’t heard before, but this book really didn’t work for me. That said, I didn’t dislike it enough to hate-review it, so I’m stuck in a kind of mushy middle of blah. Ijeoma […]

I am now a Tade Thompson fanboy

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The Kinokuniya bookstore above Shinjuku Station in Tokyo has become one of my favorite stores for its excellent selection of English-language books. They have a really good sci-fi/fantasy section, and on a recent visit, they had a whole rack dedicated to recent award winners where I noticed the winner of a new award for African speculative fiction — the Nommo Award — and was intrigued enough to buy a copy.  And let me just say that if there’s a better science fiction book this year […]

“I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners of war”

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After discovering that both my CBR 10 reading list and my personal library have been far-too-heavily skewed towards male authors, I was determined to make a correction, and I set out on my first trip away this year with a too-long wishlist that yielded a bonanza of books by women, sixteen in all, pictured here. I could easily have come home with twice as many but kept myself under control if only to avoid overweight baggage charges.  After dinner on my second night in London, […]

“What happens when you are worthless in somebody’s eyes”

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah was one of my favorite reads last year, and her Purple Hibiscus will be right up there on this year’s list, too. I don’t know how it took so long for me to find her books (correction: yes, I do), but she has quickly become one of my favorite writers. Purple Hibiscus tells the story of the Achike family through the eyes of Kambili, a young girl. Papa rules the family with an iron grip, infantilizing and militarizing and terrorizing his […]

Like a late-night Cinemax sexy thriller starring Shannon Tweed and Eric La Salle

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The only pull-quote on the front cover of this book: “Zakes Mda may have a more central place in South Africa’s literary and political spheres than any other novelist today.” — The New York Times High praise but not surprising, considering his latest novel, Little Suns, had just won the Barry Ronge Prize for Fiction and was featured in every bookstore when I visited Cape Town. A quick Google search confirmed for me that it’s as impressive as it sounds — the country’s biggest prize […]

Hating, after all, was just a drier form of drowning

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The Woman Next Door concerns two elderly women, neighbors and antagonists for the past twenty years or so, since shortly after the abolition of Apartheid, in an upscale suburb of Cape Town. One is black, the other white. Circumstance forces them to turn to each other for help. I picked this book up in Cape Town last fall, wanting to buy at least a few books by South African authors I hadn’t heard of. I thought I knew where this story was headed. Old white […]



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