Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

(No Spoilers about who the Beet Queen is)

The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich

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2016 could have easily been my year of Louise Erdrich. I went from being suspect of her to reading as much of her stuff as I could stomach to sitting up the morning of the Nobel announcement having convinced myself she was about to win. I hope and think some day she will. She really is that good. In this previous year, I have read seven of her novels and look to read the remaining seven this year. For whatever reason, for this time in […]

To run a shtinker, you have to see the broken heart inside the deadest pan.

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My first Chabon! OOOOOOF. WOW. Holy crap, you guys, did you know that his prose is exceptional and that there’s no exposition, and that he creates an utterly believable alternate timeline and a narrative that ramps up until you’re flying down the other side of the rollercoaster with no brakes? Are they all like this? Is my brain going to melt? How have I missed out this my entire adult life? Full disclosure: it took me a really long time to gather momentum with “The […]

This is what it means to be a woman in the world. Every step is a bargain with pain.

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From the blurb: From New York Times bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente comes a brilliant reinvention of one of the best known fairy tales of all time. In the novella Six-Gun Snow White, Valente transports the title’s heroine to a masterfully evoked Old West where Coyote is just as likely to be found as the seven dwarves.  A plain-spoken, appealing narrator relates the story of her parents – a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful […]

The central truth of their lives was the past….

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Empire of the Summer Moon is not for everyone. It’s an elegiac paean to frontier America and the doomed struggle of Comanche Indians to maintain their way of life in the face of an unrelenting onslaught of white encroachment. It broadly encompasses the rugged bravado of American pioneers trying to fulfill their Manifest Destiny and the individual horrors of trying to eek out a life in a hostile world. It walks the delicate line between explaining how these disparate and dichotomous worlds clashed and parsing […]

In which I try not to let my personal pickiness ruin a good book

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3.5 stars I can recognize a good book when I see one. The Absolutely True Diary… is touching, thoughtful, considered, and funny. It features a unique protagonist who is fleshed out honestly and whose diverse perspective (drawn from Sherman Alexie’s own experiences) is a valuable addition to the YA landscape. I came away from reading this book not just with an abstractly increased sense of empathy, but with an actual education. Should this book be widely read and roundly discussed? Yes, absolutely. Did I “enjoy” […]

“Death is never added to death, it multiplies.”

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I’m not going to review the book too deeply, in anticipation of our discussion. These are just some thoughts I had. I had no idea that Sherman Alexie wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals. if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend that you do. If you enjoyed this book, I couldn’t recommend that movie enough. It has a similar tone, and touches on some of the same themes. Stylistically, this book could’ve been written by Stephen King. Maybe that’s a weird comparison to make, but […]



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