Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

How to Become Tsarina of All the Russias

The Tsarina's Daughter by Ellen Alpsten

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It is nighttime, and Elizabeth Romanov stands in the nursery of her infant cousin the Tsar of All the Russias, contemplating her next move and all the events that brought her here. Though the prequel Tsarina is on my TBR, this is my first taste of Alpsten’s work. Luckily the work stands alone. And it was a fascinating read. I knew very little of the early Romanovs beyond that one of them picked his wife in what was basically a marriage cattle fair, which is probably not […]

There is beauty to be found in the melting snow and McDonalds wrappers

Little Foxes Took Up Matches by Katya Kazbek

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Mitya is not good at math, as you can see. But he’s good at imagination. Mitya is utterly convinced that no one has ever looked at two halves long enough, or attentively enough. Mitya has some stories for you. Much like Mitya himself, this novel contains multitudes. Katya Kazbek, who often works as a translator, holds the door open for the curious reader with snippets of fairy tales. Sometimes these tales are her takes on mythology, and sometimes they are the mythology of being a […]

Melania Trump Fanfiction

Our American Friend by Anna Pitoniak

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(“I felt helpless,” she said. “Here it is, I thought. This is what the bargain comes down to. This is your destiny, Lara. You will be a part of this, this tragedy. And there is nothing you can do about it. Because you chose this.”) Sofie, a former White House correspondent, is astonished to be chosen to be the biographer of the mysterious First Lady Lara Caine. As Lara tells her story, Sofie comes to realize that the secrets she’s spilling out could be ruinous […]

The devil went down to Moscow

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

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This was my first ‘Russian master’ novel, and without having read any others, I am here to tell you: start with this one: it was so.much.fun! (Cbr13bingo Gateway square). These are things I feel like I have heard no one ever utter about War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and so I feel like if you’re going to start somewhere, it should be somewhere fun. The Master and Margarita is like a Eugene Ionesco absurdist play in novel form, with the focus on Stalinist Russia. […]

Choose this day whom you will serve.

The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not as Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life by Leo Tolstoy

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I took a long, weird road to this book. I grew up in Texas with public-service-minded parents of faith. I was a political science major turned public-interest lawyer turned political staffer. Public service, making the world a better place, all of it. In my mind, Jesus’ line about rendering to Caesar what’s Caesar’s meant that, in my democratic context, I had to work the system for good. I navigated the classic political argument of the “problem of dirty hands” with all of that in mind […]

“There was something awfully unpleasant in that handsome face.”

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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The first thing I want to say is that when I made personal journal notes while reading this one, I referred to this world classic as Crime & Punny. For some reason that was just the funniest thing to me every single time over the many months it took me to work through the novel. The second thing I want to say is that this is the fifth Dostoevsky novel I’d read. Even if his writing is frustrating at times, it’s also magnetic. As the […]



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