Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Starting 2025 Off with a Quick but Sad Read

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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After following CBR for nearly a decade, I finally decided to join, so here is my first review! I chose this book to fulfill the “By an Irish Author” prompt in the Goodreads Around the Year in 52 Books Reading Challenge and the “Author’s Last Name is Also a First Name” prompt in the 52 Book Club Challenge. “As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping […]

This Week, In Irish Trauma Porn…

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The Gathering by Anne Enright

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To be fair, only half of this is Catholic trauma porn. One may wonder why Ireland, of all places, has spawned such a fabled literary heritage. Personally I think it’s their sly sense of humour, finely tuned after years of British occupation. Perhaps it’s the potatoes. Both of these books abundantly feature potatoes.  Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan) *** Bill Furlong is a coal merchant in a small town in Ireland in 1986. It’s nearly Christmas; the busiest time of the year for him. […]

Do I like short books?

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

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I find it a lot harder to explain why I liked a book than word vomiting about why it did not work for me. It becomes worse when it’s something I wouldn’t be inclined to like but something about the particular execution worked for me. So bear with me while I betray my academic roots and partake in an exercise of praise-writing. These books deserve that. On paper, Eva Baltasar’s Boulder (incredibly translated by Julia Sanches from the original Catalan) should not have worked for […]

Small Wonder

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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This is a very quick read but no less devastating for it. Set in Ireland at Christmastime 1985, Small Things Like These centers around Bill Furlong, who was born to a teenage mother. Mother and son were luckily taken in by a kind, wealthy woman, and thanks to her generosity Bill now has a very respectable middle-class life. He runs a business delivering coal and he and his wife have five children, all girls. They’ll never be rich but they’re ahead on all the bills […]

“Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing?”

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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The book: Bill Furlong owns a company that delivers coal to the residents of a small town in Ireland in the 1980s. Furlong (as he’s mostly referred to in the book) is married, has 5 daughters, and had an unusual upbringing (an unmarried mother, he was raised by her and her employer and doesn’t know his father–not an easy childhood in mid-century Ireland). One day, when he’s delivering coal to the local convent, Bill finds something that disturbs him and forces him to make a […]

Claire Keegan (1)

Foster by Claire Keegan

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“Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives into deep Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from.” This is a novella published by Claire Keegan, who was nominated for the Booker Prize last year for other short novella Small Things like These. Both novellas are good, but then one I liked better for its general tenderness. The other one is a Christmas story and I read it in the summer, so I might […]



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