Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“But still, still, it was a time she missed, a place she’d fly back to in a heartbeat”

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

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Bingo: Recommended. A book tokker I enjoy highly recommended this book Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers is one of those books that is so good, that immerses you so much, and touches you somewhere so old and grief-laden, that it’s hard to write the review. It’s one of those things where you have so much to say but without the faith you can say it right. The book flip flops between the mid eighties/early nineties and 2015. The eighties portion follows Yale, a young gay […]

They Are Not All Answered

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

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When this book is rolling, it’s a really good book. When it stops to pause to consider how good of a book it is, it comes off as pretentious. I know that sounds ridiculous but that’s how this one made me feel. It took me multiple tries to get into this one but I kept coming back to it as I knew eventually I’d catch on to what Makkai is doing. And once I did, I mostly enjoyed the ride. This one is best read […]

“Listen, direct action—direct action is the third best feeling in the world.” “What’s the second?” “Peeling off a wet swimsuit.”

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

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This isn’t the oldest thing on my TBR–that honor probably goes to either of Arundhati Roy’s novels The God of Small Things or Ministry of Utmost Happiness–but it’s definitely a long simmering recommendation from Lydia. But once I read the blurb, it made it so hard to pick up. When is anyone in the mood for reading about 1980s and the height of the AIDS pandemic? Even if it is in Chicago, which isn’t one of the cities we usually associated with the time period? Ergo, the multiple […]

“You just have to roll with the abuse, otherwise you’re a crazy bitch.”

I Have Some Questions For You: A Novel by Rebecca Makkai

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Cbr16bingo Scandal This is a brilliant, riveting novel that deals with predators, sexual abuse, childhood trauma, bullying, and complicity. It also has an interesting narrative point of view. The main character Bodie Kane tells the story but not to us; she is talking to someone specific and we learn at the end of the first chapter that it is Mr. Bloch. Who Mr. Bloch is and why Bodie addresses him will become more obvious as the story progresses. This is a fictional story that deals […]

High school cliques and murder 25 years later

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

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I Have Some Questions For You (2023) by Rebecca Makkai is my second book by Makkai. My first one was The Great Believers which centers around the AIDS crisis in 1980’s Chicago. I hadn’t known what to expect, but I was blown away by the story and the characters. I don’t now how Makkai does it, but she makes me feel what the characters are feeling in a real, visceral way. I Have Some Questions For You is a very different story, but Makkai managed the same effect. Perhaps I naturally relate […]

Twisty, Serial (the podcast)-style thriller

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

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Here is my first book of 2023 released in 2023 – and yet, with much of the action taking place in 2018, and 1995, it feels like an artifact of a different time altogether. At times, this reads like a Serial origin story. In 2018, Bodie Kane is invited back to Granby, a boarding school in New Hampshire that she attended in the early 1990s. Her graduating class was infamous for the deaths of three students – one of those students being her roommate, Thalia Keith. […]



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