Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I always thought I’d get farther. I’d like to blame the world for what I’ve failed to do

The Woman Upstairs; Family Matters; The Library Book; The Blank Wall; The Summer before the Dark; Those Who Knew; Ways of Disappearing; White Fragility; Call them by their True Name; Harbor Me by Claire Messud; Rohinton Mistry; Susan Orlean; Elisabeth Sanxay Holding; Doris Lessing; Idra Novey; Robin Diangelo; Rebecca Solnit; Jacqueline Woodson

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The Woman Upstairs – 2/5 Stars I found this book because of a list listing “Famous angry women in books” or something. And it’s true that the lead character and narrator of this book is very angry. I was hoping she’d be angrier and less articulate about her anger in this book. What’s this book about? It’s about a woman in her early 40s who was an artist who is also an elementary school teacher. She becomes friends with the mom of one her students. […]

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

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This is the second book of a series of five novels that Doris Lessing wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, called “The Children of Violence.” The first book dealt with our protagonist, Martha Quest, growing up on a white-owned farm in Rhodesia (to be clear she is white and of British heritage). So this is a second in the series, and certainly an observant reader could pick up this book without needing a lot of information from the first book to move forward, but knowing […]

We were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard

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The Memoirs of a Survivor – 3/5 Stars Amending a previous review of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things to 3/5 stars, I want to also give this novel the same grade. In part, though I have really loved a lot of Doris Lessing novels (but by no means all of — I actually really dislike one of her books) this is not one I liked that much. It’s similar to the Auster novel, which is why I bring it up, and like […]

“Don’t put me off, Anna. Are you afraid of being chaotic?”

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The structure, the writing, and the vision of this novel are absolutely brilliant. At times, the complexity of these three components can make this a difficult novel and even a frustrating one. One section might be incredibly emotionally complex and even harrowing in some ways, gutting in its own right, and then the next might be dry or ironic or amusing. The novel itself is chunked out into six different components. A frame narrative taking place in the present which is called here “Free Women,” […]

“A realm of war did not need courtesies”

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Book 1: Re: Colonized Planet 5 – Shikasta. Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor [George Sherban] Emissary Grade 9, 87th of the Period of the Last Days This is the first of five “space fiction” novels that Doris Lessing wrote in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and finally in the early 1990s. I call it “space fiction” because she calls it “space fiction” in the opening “Some Remarks” of the collection. They were published separately and then together, and then went out […]

Weekender Edition

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Started Early, Took the Dog – 4/5 Stars Not the best of the bunch, but a good one to end on. Kate Atkinson feels like she’s setting herself up to write the best writing of her career. This is a good novel, and it’s still better than the first of the series. For those of you who know about these books, they are “mysteries” in the sense that a mystery happens, and as happens with the others, Jackson Brodie, her detective kind of mostly accidentally […]



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