Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Shorts

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Great Glorious Goddamn of it All by Josh Ritter

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

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The Refugees – 4/5 Stars This short fiction collection from Viet Thanh Nguyen follows up his debut novel The Sympathizer but is not that much like that novel. Both books are good, but like a lot of follow up fiction collections after a successful first novel, these represent a longer writing period as a newish writer is working to become establish. Among other reasons why this collection might be different and why it’s also successful is that Nguyen is a newly published writer, but is in […]

with this post, you will know every book i read this year and how i felt about them

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz

Life's Too Short by Abby Jimenez

Ten Dead Comedians by Fred Van Lente

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

N or M? by Agatha Christie

Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

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You’ve probably heard of this one already. Woman takes the regional train to and from work every day and watches for a couple who live on a house backing the tracks. She likes to make up stories about what they’re doing every day. One day she sees the wife kissing a man who’s not her husband. Because her previous marriage ended due to infidelity, the main character goes to confront the wife, whom she does not know, but her alcoholism intervenes and she blacks out […]

rain, rain, go away

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

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Is there anyone who isn’t at least slightly maddened by days and days on rain? I’ve spent many summers working outdoors under mostly temporary cover. It’s been years, but I vividly remember the feeling of perpetually wet socks and bones that felt internally chilled. In the summer of 2008, when I was working as an adventure guide at a camp in the White Mountains, it rained 29 days in June and 30 days in July. We ran out of “rainy day” activities less than a […]

true story: my parents were called in for a meeting with the guidance counselor when I wrote a poem about bog sacrifices in third grade

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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…which I learned about from reading Spider magazine. Ghost Wall kicks off with a young woman being led to the peaty gloom before snapping back to a modern teenager forced to reenact the Iron Age with her father and the massive chip on his shoulder. Clocking in at a mere 130 pages, Ghost Wall bridges the expanse from ancient Britons to bored college students. Sarah Moss’s prose is sparse but lush; months worth of meditations shift and shimmer through the fog of just 130 pages.   A theme reigns supreme throughout […]

Men Are Terrible and Cannot Be Trusted

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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Ghost Wall is a story about Sylvie, a seventeen year old girl, dragged along on an Iron Age reenactment in northern England with her father, Bill. Bill’s enthusiasm for the Iron Age is a hobby; he isn’t traditionally educated in the subject, and jumps at the opportunity to join Professor Jim Slade and his students for what is essentially a two-week summer LARP. He brings his wife, Alison, and his daughter, Sylvie, along for the ride. It becomes obvious early in the novel that Bill […]

Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts…

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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This a deeply haunted book in a very disturbing (but not explicit) manner. It’s a coming of age novel and it involves a teenage girl kind of maybe slowly learning that she might be Queer by watching an older woman be an older woman, treat her earnestly, treat her well, and care for her. So that’s the thematic pitch for this novel. The plot, however, involves a summer archeological/anthropological primitivism study where a group of college lecturers, students, and a family who’s just into it […]



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