Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Wealth Economics

The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 by Lionel Shriver

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The Mandibles are a complex family Perched at the top of the family tree is the obscenely wealthy aging patriarch and his second wife, who live a life of luxury in an assisted living home for the richest of the rich. They spend their days admiring their collection of first editions in their library and enjoying the fruits of their wealth. Next branch down is the doting son who bites his tongue while longing for his inheritance to come to fruition, and the distant daughter […]

Sliding Wars

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

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Lionel Shriver is never afraid to get down into the muck of humanity and ask the hard questions. Weight gain, overpopulation, school shootings, exercise addiction – every book I’ve read of hers has conjured up strong and uncomfortable emotions. Yet I found The Post-Birthday World to be uncomfortable in a slightly different way, as it examines a quieter and more domestic question of ‘what if?’. The protagonist of this tale, Irina, is a 40-something USA expat living with her long-term partner in London. She is […]

Oof.

The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

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Oh MAN this book. This bloody book. I knew what I was getting into with another Shriver tale but… she really pushed problematic discomfort to the extreme with this one. The synoposis is this: Serenata is in her sixties and, after a lifetime of punishing physical exercise, her knees have failed her and she has not comes to grips with her new reality. Serenata is superior and insufferable in every way. She sees herself as a trend setter, but hates that everything she loves eventually […]

Tacoma calls, it’s waiting there to get rid of us all, when the big one comes better hope the car don’t stall.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Weirdly, my cannonball thus far has been strongly apocalyptic, which has been… interesting in light of current events. You’d think that this would make me more anxious, but paradoxically I’m looking at the real world and thinking “eh, people are hoarding toilet paper, but every grocery store I’ve been to has been relatively full if you’re not hyper specific about what you want. No one is stealing out of each others carts or housejacking like in The Mandibles” (Lionel Shriver’s book about the financial collapse […]

Please don’t be prophetic

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver

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Lionel Shriver does for the American economy in this book what she did for parenthood in We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is to say I’m going to go huddle in the corner and hope that this is far-fetched even though it’s written so matter-of-factly I know it isn’t. One of the cover blurbs puts it best: “if Jodi Picoult has her finger on the zeitgeist, Shriver has her hands around its throat.” Shriver is one of the authors that gets an automatic add […]

If you see Johnny Football Hero in the Hall…

The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

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I haven’t loved every Lionel Shriver book I’ve read, but like T.C. Boyle and Margaret Atwood (other authors for whom I’d read the phone book if their name was on the cover) even her misses are so well crafted that I’ll likely get around to reading her complete works eventually. Shriver’s strengths are on display here, with well crafted characters she’s not afraid to make truly flawed, bordering on unlikeable. In part because she’s unsparing, casting light on parts of humanity that are both incredibly […]



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