Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ursula Le Guin is a Bad Ass

The Wild Girls by Ursula Le Guin

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The Wild Girls is a small collection of writings by Ursula Le Guin, as well as one interview. I enjoyed this book enormously and it’s a quick read. The first piece is a short story from which the collection gets its name. The Crown men, the elite denizens of a nearby city, kidnap children of the “dirt people,” otherwise known as slaves. They steal a little girl named Mal, whose sister Modha chases after them until she’s caught up with the cadre of soldiers. Among […]

Mixed Grill

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Who will Pay Reparations on my Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Necronomicon by HP Lovecraft

Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

The Iliad by Homer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Whores for Gloria by William T Vollmann

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Celebration by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Stony the Road – 5/5 Stars Yet another book that presented answers to questions in part, but mostly added to my reading list, this slight book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. was written to support a documentary and to provide additional resources, analysis, and insight into the post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods in the US. For a more robust understanding of the Reconstruction era, Gates points us to WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, which was one of the first extensive histories […]

What dreams are made of…

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

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I’ve only discovered Le Guin in the past year or so, and her novels are so thought provoking and layered. I’ve become a huge fan, and can’t get enough of her books.  The Lathe of Heaven centres on George Orr; he discovers that the things he dreams come true – at least in some sense of the word. For example, he dreams that a relative has died, and then wakes into an altered version of reality in which she had been killed months earlier. When […]

Better on a Re-Read

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

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A year ago, I binge read the first three books in the Earthsea Cycle. A Wizard of Earthsea came in a three-way tie for my favorite read of 2018. Tombs of Atuan was my least favorite of the three. I felt like it was too fascinated with the labyrinthian tombs and the ending took too much of the lead character’s agency that she had built. Anyway, I decided to go back to the Cycle and read Tehanu, which is book four. When I discovered it would include the lead from […]

A sci-fi introspective on gender and human society

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I’m not normally a sci-fi reader, but that was part of the reason I decided to give The Left Hand of Darkness a try: I had an audible credit to use, I wanted to give Le Guin another chance, and the description said this was a classic sci-fi title. I think because I’m not familiar with the genre, the difficulty I’d had with the age of A Wizard of Earthsea didn’t bother me as much here, even though it was originally published in 1969. Sometimes groundbreaking doesn’t […]



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