Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not a book for me.

Memorial by Bryan Washington

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I really need to stop ordering the lit-fic option from Book of the Month. It so very rarely ends well. The premise here is that Mike and Benson are a couple. Mike is a chef and Benson is a daycare worker. Mike’s father is dying of cancer, and so he decides one day to go to Japan to mend their relationship, leaving Benson alone in their one bedroom apartment with his visiting mother, who only arrived that morning, also from Japan. Also, their relationship is […]

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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We all lost our collective minds over Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, which was a century-spanning epic about race and family, so the pressure was on for her sophomore effort. I think she’s made the smart choice to try for something completely different. Where Homegoing had buckets of characters, narrated in the third person, and a new setting and time period every fifty or so pages, Transcendent Kingdom is a smaller, more intimate portrait of one woman thinking about her life, and thinking about her […]

“They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.” #CBRBingo – Orange

There There by Tommy Orange

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I have complained about literary fiction before, and I will complain about it again. But this book is a great example of the genre, in part because Tommy Orange is so good at his craft (this is a debut!!), but I think also because he is an author that provides a voice that is marginalized. He has things to say. The book itself is seeking (in part) to reckon with the idea of the modern Indian, the Urban Indian, and it does so with not […]

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

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I was given this book as a birthday present about six years ago by my friend Lindsay and it has been languishing on my shelves ever since. Enter 2020, the Read Harder Challenge, and whatever the fuck else has been going on this year that means I’m reading more from my own shelves than anywhere else. And I’m glad I finally got around to it! This is an over 600 page literary fiction book, but it reads in the way I like my literary fiction […]

The last Jonathan Safran Foer book I will ever read. #CBRBingo – Nostalgia

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

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I picked this book up because a) I’ve owned it forever and pandemic reading has meant trying hard to find books off my own shelves. I’ve owned this for oh, about thirteen years? Back when I still thought I had to read books other people thought were “good” and “important.” And b) because of CBR Bingo, in which the Nostalgia square meant finding a book set during the time in which I was in high school. I had a surprisingly hard time finding books to […]

“How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?”

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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This is one of those books I don’t really feel like I can review without writing something the length of a dissertation. The Vanishing Half follows the divergent paths of identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes, from their childhoods in the 1950s through the early 1990s. The twins grow up in a small town called Mallard that is entirely populated by mixed race Black folks. The founder of the town wanted a place that people who didn’t fit in with either the white or […]



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