Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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. […]

The Swamp Will Eat You

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

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Since reading Russell’s short story collection, I’ve had her novel on my to-read. As always, bingo is a great time to knock a bunch of books off the TBR pile, so I finally made space for Swamplandia!. Sadly, I was underwhelmed. Russell’s writing is beautiful and there’s a ton of descriptive gems throughout the story, but plot wise, this book felt all over the place. Swamplandia! is an alligator themed adventure park run by the Bigtree family where they wrestle alligators and do stunts above the gator […]

I love the smell of colonialism in the morning

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

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I was so disappointed in the last two books I read that I decided to shift gears and read something more “weighty.” I’d been missing beautiful writing and thought-provoking content, so I turned to my TBR list for ideas and came up with Heart of Darkness, a short novel that I’d always meant to read but had never gotten around to. It’s an important English novella published in 1899 by a Polish author about a British steamboat captain sailing through Africa; 80 years later it […]

Not for me. #CBRBingo – Debut

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

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This was the first book in a while that my book club didn’t really agree on. We were split down the middle, actually. (I’m glad we’re still doing book club by Zoom but I miss hanging out with my people in person, and I miss all the yummy food. I know everyone misses everyone and everything right now, but I wanted to say it anyway.) If you can’t tell by my rating, I was more on the dislike side of it, though I didn’t hate […]

Sudo read this comic if you don’t already

XKCD Volume 0 by Randall Munroe

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Since starting to work from home full time in March, I have gotten a little out of the habit of checking the XKCD web-comic regularly. I’ve forgotten how I first found it; I suspect my brother forwarded me one he thought I’d like and the rest, as they say,… Anyways, I realized that I had XKCD: Volume 0 on my shelf, and I don’t think I’ve ever read it through until very recently. The tagline on the webcomic is “A web-comic of romance, sarcasm, math, […]

“Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, In my corrupted blood.”

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro

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The bile, the fire, the vitriol; do we understand now what King Lear meant when he assaulted his eldest daughter with these words? I certainly did not. I took it as an insult, sure, but I did not know the deeper meaning. Recently, I was driving to work and I heard James Shapiro on NPR. He was a guest because, despite the fact that he was promoting his latest title, a lot of people have been making a lot of headway with the statement that […]



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