Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance.”

Mr Salary by Sally Rooney

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Oof. Sally Rooney can do more with 22 pages than others can do with 200. Sukie and Nathan are set to collide. They have been tangled up in each other’s lives since she was an infant and he attended her christening. Sukie’s mother is dead, her father is dying, and she has been living on-and-off with Nathan since she was 19. He’s older, wiser, and much wealthier. She’s been in Boston, and he picks her up from the airport. They are charged from the get […]

“On her First Holy Communion, Majella could remember sitting in the chapel for a long time, with Jesus stuck to the roof of her mouth, and her trying to peel him off with her tongue. Somehow she knew picking him off with her finger was all wrong.”

Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

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Majella is the queen of coping; she has developed a system of avoiding eye contact, she gladly relies on years-long joke exchanges orchestrated by her customers and coworkers, and she is clear about people explaining idioms and small-town customs to her as a needed relief. She is also coping with the world around her; her uncle “died for the cause”, her IRA-adjacent father disappeared years ago, her mother is lost in a haze of whiskey, and her beloved grandmother has recently been beaten to death. […]

“I look for something else I could do for work but feel unqualified for everything interesting and repulsed by everything else.”

The New Me by Halle Butler

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This very moment was the correct time for me to charge through this nasty (a compliment!) little slice of life. There was a time, not too long ago, that the crippling desperation of Millie would have felt far too familiar. There is a lot of Hannah Horvath (Girls) in Millie, and I found Girls very hard to stomach when I too was young, squandering privilege, and living like a recluse outside of my seriously uninspiring job. “Everyone thinks deep in their hearts (at least when they’re young, […]

A cautionary tale of middle-class entropy

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My first response to this book, published in 1959, was to praise it as an early contribution to what was soon to be launched as the modern-day feminist movement, as it is a penetrating study of a woman trapped by her own outdated middle-class conventions. But then I realized that it would do this book an injustice to define it so narrowly, as Connell in his understated way brilliantly strips bare the racist, classist, xenophobic and intolerant mindset that afflicted much of middle and upper-class […]



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