Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

ghost stories with a history lesson or two

The Vine that Ate the South by J.D. Wilkes

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This book is fast, ferocious, and fun- which is not a surprise, considering it was crafted by J. D. Wilkes of the Legendary Shack Shakers. He wrote a rollicking Kentucky Odyssey-meets-Stand by Me and illustrated it himself to boot. Not only is this a “do you wanna see a dead body” sort of tale, but it’s also a thoughtful look at the overpowering anarchy of kudzu vine (the titular invasive vine that ate the south), and the people of Appalachia herself. All of the characters within The […]

Heartland – Heartbreaking and thoughtful in America’s Heartland

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

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This is yet another great read I “discovered” via ANUW, the Association of Northwestern University Women book club that I am a member of, by way of my employment at Northwestern University. I was a little leery, as last year the book club selections were pretty heavy to include J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. At first thought, his book has many parallels to hers, so I wasn’t that interested in reading more of the same. Vance of Elegy grew up in rural Appalachia and details the […]

Always re-read your books, people. You never know what you’ll find if you go digging back in there.

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I first read American Gods when I was twenty-five. It was only my second Neil Gaiman book; I’d read Stardust several months earlier and completely fell in love with it, so it seemed like a no-brainer to give this one a go, since so many people were over the moon about it. What I found was not what I expected. The book is long and meandering. Its characters inhabit the grey areas of the world. They do gross things, immoral things, right alongside utterly mundane and profound things. They […]

That is the tale; the rest is detail.

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I’ve been looking forward to re-reading “American Gods” since the moment I finished it the first time around. And this first re-read is definitely not going to be the last. For me, this book is a joy and a delight. It’s imaginative. It’s forward-thinking. It’s honest about how we relate to one another and see-but-can’t-see each other. It works literally as well as as metaphor. It takes itself seriously enough to be perfectly constructed and pure in tone and style, but doesn’t take itself seriously at […]

This is not your father’s Lassie…

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I embarked on reading Edgar, knowing only that it was a story about “a boy and his dog”. In fact, in the author’s own words: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a boy and his dog story for grownups. If I were looking for this book, the way I once did, that’s all I would want to know. Hide the dust jacket away. Don’t look at it again until you close the book for the last time. Read the blurbs afterward, like I do, when […]

The story of an eight-way tangle of human beings…

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Sometimes, you find a book that draws you in so slowly and slyly that you don’t realize you’re invested until you finish it, and then you can’t stop thinking about the characters, and wondering what they’re doing now. The Brothers K was that book for me. It appeared in my Kindle inbox with a sweet note (as an aside, how awesome is it that you can just send books to people that way?) and some very endearing texts about how loved the book was, and […]



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