Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

All the Memories

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

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This one got recommended to me by a lit critic. She asked for folks to submit what we liked to read to her via Twitter and she replied with suggestions. When I said mysteries, she came up with this one, along with Tana French (who I love) and “Robert Galbraith” (who I do not love). I figured she got this based on it being part of the contemporary female-written English thriller/mystery that doubles as a character study but what the heck. It was free on […]

Are We Human or Rabbit?

Watership Down by Richard Adams

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While my father’s bedtime stories to me were Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, my husband’s father read him Watership Down. It’s a book I’d never heard of before meeting him, and as it was a huge part of his childhood, I felt I should finally get around to it. In a word, this book is about rabbits. On a larger scale, this book is about a journey, not unlike the hobbits’ trek in Lord of the Rings. But if you’re looking at this book metaphorically […]

A glistening doorknob without a door

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

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I picked up this book because I wanted something atmospheric. When daylight savings hits and I stop experiencing sunlight I get into these funks and all I want is deep base and prose the blurs the line between poetry and description, and narratives that aren’t but could be. I found this book on a list of books similar to Annihilation, so if you liked the atmosphere woven through that story, and want something with even less coherent narrative, this is it. You’ve found that weird […]

Just as great as 9th grade.

Cue For Treason by Geoffrey Trease

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CBR11 Bingo – Back to School I read this book in my first semester of high school, in my 9th grade English class. All I really remembered was that it was set in Shakespearian England, and that I really liked it.  I apparently liked it so much that the copy on my bookshelf is my actual high school copy.  I wasn’t really the thieving type, and I don’t really remember why I didn’t have to return it at the end of the semester, but regardless, […]

So Now Get Up

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

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Oh, Wolf Hall. So many great and beautiful moments. So many frustrating, stagnating moments. So easy to appreciate. So impossible to judge. Hilary Mantel writes dialogue with a breezy yet deep style. Her characters say a lot by saying so little. If I’m being too paradoxical, it’s because this is a book comfortable with paradox: the lowborn rising to high positions in Tudor England. It’s a stirring tale of politics and a cautionary one about the price of true reform. Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is comfortable operating in […]

Did We Really Need that Character?

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

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I picked this up on a whim at a used book shop. The cover was nice and the first page was really intriguing. I got into it right away, and the story starts out with an incredibly compelling narrator, Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee escaping to England for asylum after a terrible event occurs in her village. As the story unfolds, however, the plot goes crazy-pants and we’re introduced to a second narrator, Sarah, a British magazine editor who met Little Bee through terrible circumstances […]



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