Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fiction Reviews Dump

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chain

Another Place You've Never Been by Rebecca Kauffman

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See by Juliann Garey

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Dietland by Sarai Walker

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

by 1 Comment

Apologies in advance, and I hope I can be forgiven for the end-of-the-year review dump. I’ve had bits and pieces to say about the books I read but it never felt well-formed enough to tell others about them. So, here we go, a review dump of some of the fiction I read this year.  A Good Neighborhood |  Therese Anne Fowler We’ve all been reading long enough to know that a book titled A Good Neighborhood is not actually about a good neighborhood. It’s about […]

Toward the end of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o’clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full steam.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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So the first part of this book, the setup, the premise, and some of the early action is basically the same as Elf. Myshkin, a minor and ultimately broke Prince in Russia, is released from a sanitarium (for mental health) and has been isolated from the world to such a degree that when he shows up into the world of the Russian aristocracy he’s either fresh-faced and innocent, or naive to otherwise more cutthroat world of that milieu. In a lot of ways, it’s either an […]

An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.

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This novel is not a retelling of the Dostoyevsky novel…I mean, I think…I haven’t read it yet. But what this book is, apparently, a kind of roman a clef, supported by the biographical details that overlap with Elif Batuman’s own, but also her own interviews in which she talks about the thin lines between fiction and nonfiction. The novel is about a young Turkish-American woman from New Jersey’s first year at Harvard as an academically gifted and academically intelligent young woman who is emotionally unready […]



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