Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Yes, There Are No Scripts. So It Is Written in the Script

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

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Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Award, which is Australia’s most prestigious literary award. It had also been sitting on my reader long before it got nominated. Reading about Lu’s win was the kick in the pants I needed to pick the book up and give it read through. And I’m really quite ashamed that I hadn’t done it sooner.  Ghost Cities is an imaginative and bonkers novel weaving together two tangentially related plots. The first unfolds in a […]

Power and the Written Word

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

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I once had a housemate who tried to teach me some simplified Chinese written characters (hanzi). Nothing too complex, just me 我, you 你, coffee 咖啡 and tea 茶, so on and so forth. But even with such an easy lesson, I realized that some connections were harder to make than others. I was able to match the the vocalization to the meaning: Wǒ is I/me. And I would see 我 written on the page and go ahead and think ‘yes, that’s I/me’. But that […]

The boy who became a fighter

Worthy : The Brave and Capable Life of Joseph Pierce by Andrea Wang

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I read a book that at first glance, I figured wouldn’t be “all that” as American Civil War stories are known, people of color are having their stories told and Asian people are having their stories told. How could this book be different? Well, when author Andrea Wang and illustrator Youa Vang got together they combined the three elements and made a unique, well-thought out story of one man and how he triumphed over adversity. That man was Joseph Pierce. His birth name has been […]

Polyandry in a world where Big Brother demands to know all

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King

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It’s been a while since I’ve read a novel. Though if I’m honest, it’s been a while since I read, period. So I’m glad my jump back into fiction was with “An Excess Male” by Maggie Shen King, because this was an interesting meditation into what-could-be if China were to maintain its one-child policy (also if the world didn’t end in the next 20 years due to climate disasters). “An Excess Male” is set in the not-so distant future – the blurb says 2030 – […]

Boy: Part Two

The Boy From Clearwater: Book Two by Yu Pei-Yun, Jian-Xin Zhou and Lin King

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About a month or so ago I read The Boy From Clearwater: Book One by Yu Pei-Yun, Jian-Xin Zhou and Lin King (Translator). At the time I didn’t think I would go onto book two, The Boy From Clearwater: Book Two, but something said I should and located an interlibrary loan copy from my local library.  Usually sequels are not as strong as the first book, but while I feel the first book was stronger in many aspects, this second book has strong pieces of […]

“Friendship is a contract between two hearts. With hearts united, women can laugh and cry, live and die together.”

Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See

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My local library has us go around in a circle and sum up the book in one word (Or a few words, I mean, they aren’t strict about it and sometimes one word just won’t do!) and my word for this one was “unrelenting” because I found it to be one of the toughest reads I’ve gone through in a while. That’s not to say it isn’t a good book, it is but, it’s about being a woman in China in the 1400s so there […]



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