Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Family

Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family? by Marisabina Russo

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I had a small roller coaster ride of thoughts and feelings about the graphic memoir, Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family? At first, I thought, “Sounds fun.” Then, “Huh, what’s going on?” And “This is slow reading.” With, “Oh, yeah digging this, getting meaty.” Along with several, “If this was fiction nobody would allow such a stereotype!” And finally, “Well that was a ride. And that afterwards was a good roundup.”   Our narrator, Cookie is “the lucky one” of her […]

“Turned out that being with someone is an acquired skill. There is an art to it. Basically, you have to watch your partner take a chisel—or a war hammer, depending on the day—and chip away at the ideal version of them that you’ve created in your mind. The person you fall in love with is always slightly different from the person you need to stay in love with. More real and more flawed, but also more complex and better defined.”

The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed M. Masood

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This was a selection for my IRL book club that I’m pretty sure I never would have picked up on my own, but I’m glad I did. If nothing else, I’ve discovered that Syed Masood has a fantastic way with words. I don’t usually care about the actual writing in books very much; I prefer for it to fade into the background, but here he’s just so smart! And clever and funny. I wish I had liked the story he was telling more. This is […]

A powerful story of belief, grief, and belonging

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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Gifty is the daughter of two Ghanaian immigrants: her mother, a depressive woman who turns to American Evangelical Christianity for a respite from life, and her father, a man who abandons his family to return to his home in Ghana. Gifty has a brother: an athlete who struggles with addiction. Throughout the novel, Gifty bounces from memory to memory as she completes her doctoral work at Stanford in neurology and takes care of her mother. Each memory reveals layer after layer of who Gifty is […]

Fire Fire Everywhere

The Burning Girls by CJ Tudor

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This book. Hmm. I think it would be easier to break this down into four parts: a thing I loved, I thing I liked, a thing I disliked and a thing I hated. A thing I loved… Being a mainline Protestant minister in  the post-church western world, I think CJ Tudor captures the subtleties and nuances of what parish ministry is like. She herself is not religious but whoever advised her did an excellent job. I appreciated it. A thing I liked… I don’t read […]

Afflicted by a hero.

Dune Messiah (Dune, #2) by Frank Herbert

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Hoo boy, talk about conflicting thoughts and feelings. This book (at least my edition) starts with an introduction by Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, who has shepherded the world of Dune since his father’s death, co-writing books with Kevin J. Anderson and making sure his father’s stories and legacy are safe. This is nice of him! He clearly admired his father very much. Anyway, in the intro, he posits that Dune Messiah wasn’t nearly as well-received by fans and critics because Herbert does something unique to […]

A surprisingly earnest (and not surprisingly literal) exploration of the Bible.

The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

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Feels good to finally knock this off my TBR after 13 years, and it was a pretty good read, but I think I wanted more from it. This mindset is puzzling, because I was actually expecting less than what I got here. I was expecting this to be more of a satirical, humorous, critical exploration of the Bible. And it was not that! At all! Jacobs is extremely, beyond-call sincere in his exploration. He’s funny, but the humor is secondary. His quest comes first. (He […]



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