Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A haunting and memorable journey

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

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Lincoln in the Bardo is a story that you chew on. You can’t just sip it and multitask and hope to passively absorb it. You have to pay attention and actively read (or listen, in my case). But it’s so rewarding when you finish it, and worth the extra mental effort. If you’re like me and thinking a Bardo is something like a bar, you are completely wrong my friend. In buddhism, a bardo is a liminal space between death and rebirth. So we are […]

Really Side-Eyeing The New York Times Over Their Choices

Pastoralia by George Saunders

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This was one of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century? This? Friends, I loathed this book. 160 pages was probably 150 pages too many. There were few if any likeable characters, no one had a unique voice, and the crassness wasn’t shocking in an absurdist way, it was just unpleasant. I picked this up because of the New York Times list and because it fit one of this year’s PopSugar Reading Challenge prompts: a book with a one-word title you […]

A Curious Collection

Liberation Day by George Saunders

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I’m a big fan of George Saunders, who is probably the best-known short story writer working in America today. At his best, Saunders’s visions of broken possible futures remind me of my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut. Like Vonnegut, it feels wrong to characterize Saunders’s work as science-fiction, but he does seem appropriately concerned with it means for humanity that we have centered technology in our lives and ceded so much to it already. The dark possibilities of tech are at the heart of the title […]

End of Year Final

Phases of Gravity by Dan Simmons

The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore White

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Stella Maris by Cormac Mccarthy

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

Liberation Day by George Saunders

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

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Phases of Gravity One of the very few “realistic” novels by Dan Simmons. Usually his novels are science fiction, horror, fantasy, or some combination of those. Sometimes his books are noir or suspense, and even though those books take place in the real world, it’s just not quite the same thing as realism. Don’t tell Raymond Chandler I said this.  This book was written in the late 1980s and our lead character Dan Baedecker is a retired astronaut who has also in recent years becomes […]

How do you like to rate/review short stories?

Tenth of December by George Saunders

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I have no idea how to review or even rate short story collections but I will start with breaking down individual stories and then go over broader themes I suppose and hopefully have collected a general feeling by the end. This will probably have spoilers since its hard to talk about short stories sometimes without context and in such short bursts the context is…most of it. 1. Plot: The first story follows a multi shifting perspective of a girl who gets kidnapped, a kidnapper, and […]

Mixed Bag Catch Up

Samarkand by Amin Maalouf

Shiloh by Shelby Foote

Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl

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Samarkand – 4/5 Stars This book immediately wonder how many novels have Omar Khayyam as a major or main characters. So in this way, being shown in careful detail and with loving care how and why Omar Khayyam is such an important person, cultural touchstone, and inspiration to such a huge part of the world is itself a gift that this novel offers. In addition to this, the sense of adventure in this novel that is created in the opening sections, and then carried over […]



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