Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In India

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

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I know next to nothing about India. Never been there. Have a few friends/acquaintances who are but don’t know enough about their experiences to speak intelligently on what the country is like. This may have been the first fictional novel I’ve read set in the book so I went into it with eyes open. Take that all with a grain of salt because I don’t know what the perspective is from actual Indians on the book. But as a deconstruction of the country of India, […]

“That’s the word! Untouchable!”

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

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This semester, I’m teaching a course on global anglophone literature, i.e. literature written in English that’s neither British, Irish, nor American. (Nor, for that matter, Canadian, Australian, or New Zealander, much as I wanted them! And not quite postcolonial fiction, since our first three novels are still within the late colonial period.) Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, originally published in 1935, was the first novel we covered for the class (it narrowly edged out Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi), and what a beautiful entry into the subject it […]

The Marriage Trap

The Widows of Malabar Hill: A Perveen Mistry Novel Book 1 by Sujata Massey

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According to the book jacket, this is “a mystery of 1920s India” and that was enough to make me very curious. “The Widows of Malabar Hill” is a murder mystery, and a fine one at that, but it is also a picture of Bombay (not sure why it’s Bombay and not Mumbai) shortly after WWI from the point of view of a young Parsi woman named Perveen Mistry. Through her, Sujata Massey immerses the reader in a world that straddles the traditional and the modern. […]

Freedom and Chains

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This is my Backlog book. I have been meaning to read this book for a while now. Once I started it, I realized I was rereading it. Which, I will say, fits this because I had forgotten about this gem called Chained by Lynne Kelly. To work off a debt, Hastin leaves his village in India to work as an elephant keeper for a man who wants to restart his circus. Innocent Hastin only sees a way to help his mother and ill sister, not […]

A primer in immigration and the understanding of other: a second look at The Namesake

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August 2018 Review The Schaumburg library chose this book for a communitywide book for the fall, and thus it is also on my book club list. I read it five years back but decided to give it another go to have a refresher before the discussion. This go round, I “read” the audio format. First of all, I am SO PUMPED to live in a place that picked such a book to foist on the community. What an enlightening and refreshing book. It’s almost a […]

My first LOVE of the year

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 Y’all, I don’t really know where to start with this book. I loved it. And I don’t fully understand what I read? I devoured every word but also had a tough time picking it back up after I’d put it down. It was amazing and I am going to have a very hard time telling you why. I did not know the backstory on this one until I was almost through, but twenty years ago, the author Arundhati Roy broke onto the scene with her […]



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