Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

A last year’s book revisited, with splendid results

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

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The Chancellor has chosen Louise Erdrich’s LaRose for his September book club pick, and I was really excited. I read it for CBR8 last year, and I gave it a solid 4.5 stars. I was still on a readers’ high from The Round-House, which colored my judgment of LaRose. The beauty of a re-read is that you can really dig into major themes and ideas, because you know how the book already ends. Since I reviewed this book last year, I won’t reiterate the plot for you here. I will, however, link to ElCicco’s most excellent and comprehensive review, which […]

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:106 |

An eye-opening expose of the opiate crisis

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

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Right now, I’m on a “read books for book club” streak, so my personal reading project is on hold for a few weeks. My library GenLit book club voted on its second-half-of-the-year selections a few months back, and Sam Quinones’ Dreamland was one of the winners. I don’t know too much about the opiate crisis in intimate detail, so I thought I would be informed. I had no idea how illuminating this book turned out to be. Quinones is a journalist, and you can tell that he lays all the pieces out in painstaking detail. He chronicles a small town […]

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:105 |

An early foremother of my feminist literary experience

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

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Back in high school, I hadn’t discovered the word “feminist” yet, but I had discovered the word “suffragette.” For my American history research paper in 11th grade/Junior year, I wrote about suffragettes and I wore a pantsuit for my presentation (I had no idea that Pantsuit Nation would be a part of my life sixteen years later, nor that I would still not live to see a female president of the United States). That Spring, for my English III research project, I decided to write about Sylvia Plath. I remembered reading about her for my 8th grade research paper on […]

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:104 |

A powerful and devastating Shakespeare adaptation

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier

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I’ve not read all the Hogarth Shakespeare project books yet, but I do like literary adaptations of classic works. The Austen Project books have not all been amazing, but most of the interpretations have been original and engaging, and they’ve shown me how a classic work rooted in its time finds its legs in a different century. Tracy Chevalier, whose historical fiction is among the few that I will read as a matter of necessity (with the exception of At the Edge of the Orchard), takes a turn with Shakespeare. And her play is Othello. If you’ve read the play […]

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:103 |

Amy Tan’s nonfiction

The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan

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I read The Joy Luck Club in college for a women’s literature course, and while it wasn’t my favorite book, it was certainly interesting. I do think Amy Tan gets pigeonholed quite a bit as a “Chinese” American writer, and while she writes about a heritage from China, it’s not exactly fair to think of the experiences she writes about as exclusive to Chinese-Americans, or even more broadly, Asian-Americans. I won The Opposite of Fate, a nonfiction collection, at my undergrad’s English Department annual Book Exchange one year, and I’m finally getting around to reading it. Tan writes a lot […]

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:102 |

An acclaimed Arthur Miller play with mixed results

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

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I never read The Crucible in high school, but The Chancellor’s taught it to his American Literature class before, and he’s talked to me about Arthur Miller and the ideas he wrote about in his plays. Plus, I’d seen the AWFUL adaptation that was quite thick on nakedness and a bit thin on thematic development, so I was curious to see how the play would stack up. And, let’s not forget that we’re living in a weird hybrid McCarthyistic/Nixonian era that I thought only existed in history books but our presidential administration decided to revive in an attempt to kill […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:101 |

What happens when we fall? We rise strong.

Rising Strong by Brené Brown

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We just got done with a rousing book club discussion of C’s pick, Brené Brown’s Rising Strong, which acts as a sequel to her highly-acclaimed Daring Greatly. I’m not one for self-help books, but Brown touches on something that most of us don’t think explicitly about and runs us through mental processes that affect our daily lives and self-worth. This book works best if you’ve already read Daring Greatly, because Brown talks us through the Roosevelt quote about lying facedown in the arena and uses it as her jumping point for this book—rising strong amid failures. She slows down the […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:100 |

An interesting theological study of Harry Potter

Looking for God in Harry Potter by John Granger

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I’ve been a fan of the Harry Potter books since I was a freshman in college (it’s amazing how going to college opened up my world in so many ways). I like to read and engage with the books at theoretical levels, and when I was taking an independent study, I encountered John Granger’s critical work on the novels. He writes from the perspective of a Christian academic who was at first skeptical of the novels and then became a fan after engaging with them theologically. Granger discusses the novels in context of Christianity, and the themes that engage with […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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8/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:99 |

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