Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Beware of Bored Women!

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov

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ESPECIALLY if you are the one to damn them into a life of boredom. I sought out this short story after being utterly enthralled by the 2016 Florence Pugh tour-de-force Lady Macbeth. If you are a sucker for a brutal period drama chock full of female desperation-disguised-as-power, then hustle your bustle to your  nearest ye olde video rental and check. it. out. The film is phenomenal, and I was immediately curious about the source material! A little Wikipedia creeping led me to Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk […]

once again: great book, TERRIBLE cover

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

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The cover is even WORSE this time- not only do we have another DIY looking illustration,  but the featured pull quote from The Australian‘s John Freeman is ABYSMAL: “Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.” Fuck right off, guy. Emphasis on GUY. Just because Austen characters aren’t slapping and cussing each other out does not mean that they aren’t also filled with the contained rage of being a woman trapped in position- a woman who will do […]

Don’t have a grandfather? Go pick one out at your local senior home

Can You Whistle, Johanna? by Ulf Stark

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Can You Whistle, Johanna? by  Ulf Stark, translated by Julia Marshall and illustrated by Anna Hoglund was not what I expected of this English translation of a Swedish story. I thought at first it was going to be a book about a friend teaching another to friend (a female) to whistle. Or maybe a younger sibling some whistling techniques. Perhaps even, it was going to be some way to show that boys and girls are equal (everyone can whistle). Instead, it is about a young […]

dreams fill in where memories fail

Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, Natasha Wimmer

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If you too are seeking respite from this surprisingly hot Saturday, I whole-heartedly recommend spending an hour curled up in front of a fan while reading Space Invaders from cover to cover. This is the second fictional account of being a child in Pinochet’s Chile to rise through my TBR pile this year; How to Order the Universe offered one girl’s story, while Space Invaders  trades dreams and memories from a chorus of children who grew up too soon against the terror of the 1980s. Unlike the precocious […]

A hurricane that never lets up

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

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Content warnings: rampant homophobia and sexism From NPR’s review: Brutality abounds, and the violence, often directed at women and gay people, is so close to real events that it almost qualifies as nonfiction. This is not an easy book to read, for multiple reasons. The first and most obvious reason is clear when you open the book and start getting a few pages in–you’ll quickly flip through and realize that yes, there is not a single paragraph break to be seen. Melchor has taken the verbosity […]

“Everything that happened next was only possible because my mother was absent. It wasn’t that she left the house much, it was that a part of her had abandoned her body and now resisted coming back.”

How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada

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A precocious child, a beat-up Renault, traveling salesmen and the uneasy promise of ghosts populate this tiny but mighty book. M, our narrator, has struck a deal with her father. They haunt the dusty roads of Pinochet’s Chile as a sales-duo, using M’s charms to sway shop owners towards buy more nails, hammers, and other hardware than her father could sell on his own. If the person in charge focused on my pupils, instead of encountering me, he or she encountered every possible form of […]



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