Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Creepy People Gonna Creep…and a Girl is Gonna Disappear

I am Watching You by Teresa Driscoll

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Sarah and Anna are best friends, excited to be done school, ready to blow off some steam in the city before they take their A Levels later that summer.  Full of verve and vivacity, they catch the eye of Ella Longfield, a middle aged mom headed off to attend a florist’s convention.  They also catch the eye of two handsome young men that seem very taken by the ladies, buying them beer, flirting and to the horror of Ella, sharing honestly that they had both […]

These Virtues are Formed in Man by His Doing the Actions

Severance by Ling Ma

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“I couldn’t see myself as a product coordinator forever, coordinating Bibles, shaving razors, Nike sneakers, or whatever, from my desk in New York to various plants across Southeast Asia. Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.” On the surface of it—introverted young woman absorbed by her career struggles to survive a plague-ridden world—this book’s premise isn’t particularly innovative. Turns out it’s all in the execution. This finely crafted novel fully deserves the flotilla of awards it gathered in […]

How long ’til black future month?

How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

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I picked this book up purely on the strength of my love for N.K. Jemisin.  I’m generally not a fan of the short story format.  The only short story collections I’ve read cover to cover are the ones written by Neil Gaiman, who is very high on my favorite author list.  N.K. Jemisin is an incredible author who creates fantastic worlds so I anticipated enjoying the book, but I was blown away at how her short fiction thoroughly engaged me in a way that the […]

Undiagnosed Mental Illness Will Wreck Your Life

Too Bright to Hear, Too Loud to See by Juliann Garey

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“…You are very lucky. Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are…bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart. It’s not a weakness, Grey. It’s what I love about you most.” Our man Greyson, a successful Hollywood executive with a wife and an eight-year-old daughter, has an undiagnosed mental illness. It’s an unescapable, nameless issue that […]

When we came to the end, we loved it

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

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I picked up this novel because I enjoyed Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, though, as my review states, I was at a loss to explain exactly why I liked it. Ferris’s sense of humor appealed to me, though, and I like authors who don’t claim to have all the answers. Then We Came to the End is his first novel, and it is certainly a curiosity. Written in first-person plural point of view, the narrators’ “we” refers to the employees of an […]

The wise sense what is to come

The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation by C.P. Cavafy

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I know very little about poetry and even less about how to write about poetry, so to quote Prince, forgive me if this goes astray. I first heard of Cavafy when I was browsing through a book of gay love poems at Barnes and Noble back in my early twenties when I was first coming out. The simplicity of the poem made me think he was an ancient, perhaps the male equivalent of Sappho, but when I found this book, The Collected Poems of C.P. […]



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