Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Get Out

The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes

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I need a valium after reading this. I’ve written in this space before and in other places about my concern when white authors write from the perspective of non-white characters. Obviously, people writing trans-racially is not uncommon, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. Many great works of literature would be lost without folks doing this. And yet, considering the strong power dynamics of white supremacy in the United States (and frankly, the globe), a more natural distance separates colonizer from the colonized, no matter […]

Welcome to the modern world

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I was in the sixth grade when the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed. I was a little too young to be fully aware of Waco, Ruby Ridge, or the first World Trade Center attack, and, as an army brat, while the first Gulf War affected my family personally, I only really saw it as something that might take my father from me. So the 1995 terrorist attack was the first real event that captured my interest – and not least […]

#CBR10Bingo: Home, Something, Home (double Bingo!)

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#CBR10Bingo: Home, Something, Home (this book is set at Stovner in Oslo, three stops away from where I live on the metro. It also concerns exactly the sort of pupils that I teach.) Two youths, both living in the same tower block in a suburb on the east side of Oslo, in Stovner (where the large majority of inhabitants are immigrants or the children of immigrants). They start out going to the same high school. Starting in the year 2000, the framing device consists of these […]

#CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 – The Hate U Give

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#CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 (one of the ten most banned or challenged books in 2017) Starr feels like she’s living two lives, and in a way she is. She goes to a prestigious private school along with her siblings, where they are among the only black students. She has a white boyfriend, who calls her “Fresh Princess”, thinking she’s a bit like Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She lives in a poor and rough neighbourhood, where drug dealing and gun violence isn’t unusual. Her […]

Racism is Racism, No Matter What Time Period

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Last summer I helped my boss chaperone his student study-abroad trip to Australia, and the class read this book on the plane going over. I was far more enticed with Air New Zealand’s extensive on-flight entertainment package, and so I spent my plane ride in the iron-a** challenge watching all six (extended) Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films instead.  Since returning, my boss has been passively placing The Secret River in obvious places on my desk, which I’ve learned is his silent way of […]

I’ve been waiting for this moment for Cannonball my life, oh Lord

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CBR10Bingo: Backlog (Cannonball! and Bingo! Woohoo!) After reading a few Sherman Alexie books a few years ago, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony started popping up in my suggestions, and for some reason, I thought it was poetry rather than a novel. Once I read the description, I put it on my wishlist, where it languished for several months until I finally bought a copy last summer at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles on a long lunch break from jury duty. I’ve pulled it off […]



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