Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser (translator)

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 The Hour of the Star is a book that climbed onto this year’s TBR by the Read Harder Challenge. One of this year’s tasks is to read a work of literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author. So, I went to books already on my radar to see if any fit the bill and sure enough Clarice Lispector’s final book did just that (Lispector was severely injured in a fire in her 40s and nearly lost her hand). It also was a book […]

Funny and Well-Written, but Left Me Wanting

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes

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cbr17bingo – red This is an interesting book to review because it accomplished what it set out to do, and accomplished it very well; I’m just not sure I liked what it set out to do. It provides a snapshot of a family over the course of about 10 months. While much of it is from the first person perspective of daughter Miranda, who visits her parents monthly, there are sections that are brief scenes as though from a play, a couple of third person […]

We’re all just animals after all

Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

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Bingo Square: Rec’d (Colormeloverly raved about this novel repeatedly last year on IG) Definitely not my usual kind of novel nowadays – I don’t venture into literary fiction all too often anymore but if they were all like this, I might. Shortly after their wedding, Lewis notices some odd changes in his body, and after consultation, he is diagnosed with an animal mutation: he is transforming into a great white shark, and has less than a year before his transformation will be complete and he […]

“Life was very different when you walked through it.”

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

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CBR17 Bingo: Green – Behold, the cover! Recently-retired Harold receives a note from his friend Queenie, who he has not seen in twenty years, to inform him that she is dying, and sets out to walk the length of England to go and see her, in the belief that as long as he walks she will not die. This is a pilgrimage across England, but internally it is also a pilgrimage of Harold’s self, in which he comes to terms with the many things that […]

“The economy’s in ruins, no one’s got a job, and we just don’t care, it’s bliss.”

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

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It’s 1983. Thatcher is at No. 10 and Nick Guest, age 21, has just graduated from Oxford University. He finds himself as a lodger at the house of a college friend, Toby, whose father Gerald Fedden has been elected as a promising new conservative MP. Nick, who comes from a solidly middle class background, finds himself a loose thread intricately woven into the upper class social fabric of the Freddens. Nick has the wrong background and the wrong predilections, and he knows it doesn’t take […]

Around the World Around the World

Night Prayers by Santiago Gamboa

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Very mixed feelings on Night Prayers. Ultimately, it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2025. It’s also one of the more frustrating. Gamboa writes in the style of his Latin American contemporaries such as Bolaño and Marquez. And for the most part, he does it well. This is a style I always enjoy sampling, even if it can frustrate me at times with its tangents and magic realism. I quit the book several times in the beginning but was inexorably drawn back to it and […]



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