Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should you fear . . . It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.”

The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1) by Seth Dickinson

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The Traitor Baru Cormorant is probably the strongest (fictional) condemnation of colonialism that I’ve ever read. (And there have been some contenders.) I’ve been putting off writing a review of this book (and rating it) for a month now, because I was having such a hard time trying to sum up its complexities, and what it did to me as I was reading it. Mainly, though, this is exactly the reason I love fantasy and science fiction, because it can take real-world concepts like anti-colonialism,  […]

The Scope May Have Been Too Wide/Ambitious

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

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I loved Yangsze Choo’s novel, The Ghost Bride, so I was happy when I discovered that this novel had been released, and immediately bought it. It is set in 1930s Malaysia and has three different characters whose lives end up interweaving in odd ways. There is Ji Lin, a young woman, who is working in the city as a dress maker and moon lighting as a dancer.  Though she had higher ambitions, her family would not let her go into a profession, and only eventually […]

Racism is Racism, No Matter What Time Period

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Last summer I helped my boss chaperone his student study-abroad trip to Australia, and the class read this book on the plane going over. I was far more enticed with Air New Zealand’s extensive on-flight entertainment package, and so I spent my plane ride in the iron-a** challenge watching all six (extended) Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films instead.  Since returning, my boss has been passively placing The Secret River in obvious places on my desk, which I’ve learned is his silent way of […]

Amazing, absolutely breath taking. One of My Top 5 Reads This Year.

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Bingo Square Round 2: Underrepresented I expected that this novel would be good given faintingviolet’s review, but it completely surpassed those expectations.  I was completely blown away by this novel, and how elegantly Gyasi plotted this family epic, showing how the slave trade shaped two different countries. I have read books and novels that addressed the experiences of men and women stolen from their homes who survived the Middle Passage and were forced into the United States slavery system. I’ve read about sharecropping, prison labor, the […]

No man here lives a charmed life.

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Okay, I’m probably operating on far too little sleep to write a coherent review, but here goes. The prose here is a luminous dream, casting it’s shadows upon the mind and lulling the reader into a warm and tranquil languidity. Coming so fast on the heels of the tenaciously awkward writing of Stephanie Meyer, the fluidity exhibited by Conrad is both refreshing in its rarity and a disheartening reminder that I can never be the writer I often dream that I am. This story has […]

My, what big teeth you have.

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The inimitable H.G. Wells, from 1895-98, wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. That’s an unbelievable concentration of brilliance that I can’t find in another writer. Someone like Stephen King has written numerous works that will (or have already) become classics of their genre, but they’re spread out over a career (for instance, 1978’s The Stand followed hot on the heels of 1977’s The Shining, but Misery came out in 1987 and The Green Mile […]



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