Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

On one hand, this messiah gig is a b****.

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

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This is an early novel from the eventual Booker Prize winner Paul Beatty. Paul Beatty’s win for The Sellout a few years ago was certainly a surprise. The layers of irony and reversal happening in that novel and the ways in which the novel requires a certain experience with American life meant it felt like a very unlikely winner. This novel is probably even more unlikely. What’s funny about this book to me is that I have worked in two high schools that had this in the […]

Episode 1-31: Just the Beasts Under Your Bed, In Your Closet, In Your Head

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https://killingmykindle.com/2018/08/27/episode-1-31-just-the-beasts-under-your-bed-in-your-closet-in-your-head/ Wherein I review: 119. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker 120. Serpentine (Anita Blake #26) by Laurell K. Hamilton 121. The Sellout by Paul Beatty 122. Turtles All The Way Down by John Green 123. Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet 124. Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames 125. The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp Helene Wecker gives us a historical love story between two servant myths. Laurell K. Hamilton comes back and sets Anita Blake against […]

I don’t know if I got out of this book what I was supposed to…and my head hurts thinking about it.

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As an avid reader of literary fiction, I make it a habit to read the Man Booker Prize winning novel each year. I’m always curious to see what the committee selects, as well as their rationale for the prize. For two years in a row, a black male author has won the prize—last year’s winner, Marlon James, wrote a hefty tome about Jamaica, A Brief History of Seven Killings. This year’s winner, American Paul Beatty, wrote a much shorter book that took me almost the […]

Laughing at Race in America

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I’ve beensitting on this review for a couple of weeks, struggling to know what to write. The book won the Man Booker prize, which often means a challenging read. After reading the book I watched an interview of Beatty to get a sense of what he was like. He was charming, yet deflecting. I read another interview and found that he truly focuses on the craft of writing. He’s not prolific. But the attention to every word is evident in The Sellout. The book begins […]



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