Our motto here at Cannonball Read is “Sticking it to cancer one book at a time,” and I think I have found a novel that epitomizes that sentiment. Zinzi Clemmons’ debut novel What We Lose is about losing your mother to cancer. Narrator Thandi was a college student when her mother died. Through Thandi’s recollections as an adult, the reader gets glimpses of how her family, her friends, her socio-economic background, and race intersect with her experience of her mother’s illness and death, and with […]
Timely Novel on Race from almost 90 Years Ago
Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, published in 1929, is a short but powerful and provocative tale about race and racism. The two main characters, Irene and Clare, are childhood friends whose lives diverged in their teen years but intersect again as adults. Both women are fair skinned enough to pass as white. Clare has chosen to hide her past and her race from her wealthy white husband. Irene has married a successful black doctor and has a seemingly good life in Harlem. When their paths meet […]
My Possession Obsession
Possession is a mesmerizing story, or two stories, steeped in mystery, secrecy and discovery. Set in both the modern world and the Victorian age, Possession tells the parallel stories of characters whose intellectual pursuits bring them together but also spark jealousies alongside great creativity. Byatt’s writing is genius. The detail and creativity, the imagination, she brings to her work is simply breathtaking. The novel begins in London, circa 1990. Roland is a scholar/academic, living with longtime girlfriend Val in rather dire straits. His field is […]
Now and at the hour of our death …
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott is a delight to read. McDermott’s writing is warm and evocative, featuring vivid, relatable characters and spaces in which one longs to linger. Brooklyn and the Catholic Church of the 1920s come alive through her novel. At the same time, McDermott uses these very real people and the situations they face to challenge the reader to think about life, death, suffering and redemption. McDermott presents us with a world that we see almost exclusively from the perspective of women […]
Epic translation of The Odyssey
The Odyssey by Homer
It has been many a year since I’ve read any of the Greek classics. I remember reading some plays back in high school (early 1980s), but I’m not sure I ever read the entirety of Homer’s Odyssey, and if I did, I most likely didn’t find much enjoyment in it. A classic of western literature and a staple of both literature and western civilization courses, The Odyssey tells the epic tale of a heroic Greek warrior’s 20-year quest to get home after the Trojan War. […]
Fight the Power
This short (115 page) treatise comprises two lectures which noted Cambridge academic and classicist Mary Beard delivered in 2014 and 2017. In these lectures, “The Public Voice of Women” and “Women in Power,” Beard examines the classical roots of the silencing of women’s voices and its effect on women in the modern Western world. Ultimately, in considering how women might truly become “voices of authority,” Beard suggests a reconsideration of “power” itself. In the first essay, Beard takes the reader back 3,000 years to demonstrate […]
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