Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I’ve read 18 books this year. 7 of them were read in the last week.

Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang

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I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts at work, and reading Harry Potter with my son at home. That hasn’t left a lot of space in my life for reading for me. I’ve kind of made up for that over the last week, but I’m still quite a bit behind where I should be this year. I think I haven’t generally read a lot of contemporary fiction because it seems to often consist of bad things happening to broken people. Even looking at the […]

A Game of Chicken

City of Thieves by David Benioff

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Seventeen year old Lev lives alone in Leningrad. It’s 1942 and the siege is in full swing; Lev’s mother has left the city with his younger sister. Lev’s father, a renowned poet, has been dispatched by the NKVD years ago into an unmarked grave, and so Lev lives alone in his apartment building, with people who share his fate but that aren’t his friends. There is little more to do for Lev than read chess manuals and focus on the all-encompassing hunger he feels. One […]

“Those Words You Want to Say Right Now? Don’t Say Them.”

City of Thieves by David Benioff

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Because I’m always a billion years behind popular culture, I had no idea that the David Benioff of the Game of Thrones TV show was also an author. And a good one! In applying for a freelance job that wanted an analytical summary of the first three chapters of City of Thieves, I was hooked and had to read the whole thing. I didn’t get the job, but I really enjoyed the novel. City of Thieves is a historical fiction surrounding the siege and starvation of […]

Just wait until I get my foot on the ladder.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

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This is one of those novels that’s been in my collective TBR list of my mind for more than a decade and if you want a young writer to feel like abjectness and poverty and being a wastrel are a priori to being successful, I have to imagine that this is going to be one of the earliest good examples to give them a copy of. It’s almost like a Letters to a Young Male Writer in that it’s a journalist trying to make it […]

Seen and Heard

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When I started reading this book, I didn’t think I’d relate to so much of it. I knew it was about her body as a “woman of size,” and I knew a bit about Gay’s history as a victim/survivor of sexual violence, but I’m neither of these things, so was surprised. I thought this book would be difficult to read due to the subject matter, but somehow, she accomplishes the impossible and writes an accessible, honest, brave and powerful story of healing. She tells a […]

I don’t know how I let things get so out of control, but I do

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Every human that I know and trust in my life has heard me rave about this book. I’m going to keep my lunatic love for Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body to a tight word count here, but please know that if we are sitting together for any length of time, and the opportunity to talk about it comes up, you won’t be allowed to get a word in edgewise for probably at least two hours. I love it. I love Roxane Gay’s voice. I […]



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