Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Intimacies, or, How Lipgloss Led to my 13th CBR Review

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

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I hadn’t heard of Katie Kitamura until there was a small online to-do about her lipgloss. Kitamura, in an interview with New York Magazine, included a $24 lipgloss in a listicle of “15 items she can’t live without.” My regular internet reading brought to me a Hot Take about Katie’s love of this lipgloss, and here’s the Hot Take: including this very silly item in her list is tone deaf (lipgloss in this economy!?), and furthermore, lipgloss has nothing to do with literature, so it’s […]

Up Close and Personal

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: uncannon. The novelist is of Japanese descent and her book comes from the perspective a non-white character.  Reading Intimacies was a beautiful struggle. I wanted to like it more than I did. It has a lot going for it. But it’s kind of a donut book in that there’s a big hole in the middle: we know almost nothing at all about the protagonist. There’s little about her background, who she is, what her interests are, etc. Katie Kitamura even withholds her name. […]

It’s not you, it’s me. I think?

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

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Bingo: Travel. (This novel takes place in my home country, the Netherlands. I moved away 14 years ago and haven’t been back in four years – I miss it so much! It was interesting reading an outsider’s perspective of the Netherlands, though the country largely functions as a backdrop.) An unnamed, young woman moves from New York to The Hague, after the death of her father. She has taken on a new job as interpreter at the International Court, where she has to translate for […]

A LITERARY GONE GIRL!!! (Just kidding)

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This is a perfectly fine novel completely misserved by the attention its received. Ooooh, an American man has gone missing in the Mediterranean and his parents want someone to find him! Must compare it to Patricia Highsmith! Oooooh a female narrator with a kind of ethereal voice narrates a strange marriage circumstance. Must compare it to Gone Girl! But it’s neither Gone Girl nor is it Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s something altogether different those, more slow burn, very little suspense, a kind of mystery, but less about […]



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