Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Atticus was almost home when the state trooper pulled him over.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Flygirl by Sherri L Smith

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I didn’t actually mean to put these books side by side in choosing to read them so close together. But they share a few similarities. Flygirl takes place in the 1940s and deals heavily with segregation and passing. And Lovecraft Country takes place in the 1950s and also deals heavily with segregation, as well as the Green travel guide, Jim Crows laws, and a…kind…of passing. But the weird thing both shared, in back to back days was that both, in dialog, used the word “panic […]

Dublin Soul

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle

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Cbr12bingo Music, BINGO ~ 4 corners and center square Also an “adaptation” possibility Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s first novel (published in 1987) is set in 1980’s Dublin and centers on a group of working class teens/20-somethings (and one geezer) who come together to form “the world’s hardest working band,” The Commitments. The Commitments is a short, humorous novel that tracks the group’s rocky development and ambitions. Its lively colloquial dialog makes the characters come alive and keeps the novel moving at a rapid clip. Jimmy […]

People swallow lies easily provided they are big enough

Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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CBR12 BINGO: Yellow I’ve been in the mood to revisit Watchmen since I saw the extraordinary HBO series earlier this year (best television in recent memory, btw). Then references to the comic book series popped up in Eleanor & Park, and it gave me an extra push to reread the graphic novel that I first encountered when I was in college. Plus. . . .can’t get more yellow than that cover, can you? I wanted to see whether this classic holds up after 34 years, […]

In which A Square contemplates the universe

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

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Flatland is broken up into two parts. In the first A Square explains to the reader his universe which is called Flatland, a two dimensional world. There are only two dimensions in Flatland: one that runs North to South and one that run West to East. All women are Lines and there is a separate caste system based around the number of sides one has. In such system, the lowest caste are isosceles triangles, for how can one be worthy of respect if they are […]

Tricked Into a YA Romance

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Lainie Taylor

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In trying to find an agent for my own novel, I asked my friends to suggest some of their favorite books that closely resembled my fantasy so that I could shamelessly query the agents of those books for my own devices. Faintingviolet lent me Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I had no idea going into this book what it was since I’d never heard of Lainie Taylor before. But faintingviolet knows I’m not a huge fan of YA, and I pretty much avoid romance at any […]

The Greatest Library that Never Was

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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I was a huge fan of the Night Circus, so I was ecstatic when the lovely faintingviolet shared her copy of the Starless Sea with me. To give too much of the plot away takes all the joy out of reading this story, but the baseline is that there’s a magical library hidden underground accessible by doorways above. The nature through which patrons find these doors varies to fate, and in recent years, someone’s been closing all the doors. At least until a grad student named Zachery stumbles […]



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