Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Fiat.Luxury's Reviews:

I, a person who does not read memoirs, enjoyed this memoir

Just Kids by Patti Smith

by 1 Comment

I had hardly ever listened to Patti Smith’s music before picking up this book, and I hardly ever read memoirs, because I find most of them self-indulgent and boring, sorry, memoirists! But this one was recommended to me as a memoir that was “worth it” and it was available from the library. Good news: it was totally worth it! Even if you, like me, are only passingly aware of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorp’s body of work! Smith’s prose is plainspoken and authentic, which makes […]

Mr. Popper’s Penguins, or, what we read in a Japanese emergency room.

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater

by 9 Comments

An hour before we landed in Kyoto, my son complained of a fever. Two days later, he was still in bed, nauseated, his fever ranging between 101 and 104. The next day, his fever disappeared…only to reappear with a full-body rash the next day. We were concerned about this rash because we live in the tropics, in a place where mosquito-borne illnesses are common, and we knew the signs of high fever, body aches, and a rash. As soon as I saw it, I thought, […]

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

by 1 Comment

This description of this book on Amazon is “an account of the unbridgeable gulf between a family of Hmong refugees and their American doctors.” It is that!  And it is also more than that. Heart-wrenching and illuminating, it’s also about culture and love and pride and science and humanity. Lia Lee, a Hmong child whose family moved to California, suffered from epilepsy. Her first seizure was when she was only months old. When her parents took her to the hospital, there was a total language […]

A short, weird Japanese novella

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

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Are you into Kafkaesque novellas? Do you, like me, need a weird, short palate-cleanser between giant 600+ page fantasy novels? Do you love books that kind of don’t make sense until you think about it after finishing the last page? If so, I have the book for you! I read this book based on a recommendation from this Substack – I got it from the library and read it on my flight home from Japan (!) which was extremely appropriate, given that the setting is […]

Classic of Classics: The Hobbit

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

by 1 Comment

Mr. Lux and I both have clear, fond memories of our introduction to this book: discovering an old copy sitting on a picnic table in a Texas playground, and starting to read with no idea what was about to happen (him) and of nightly out-loud reading after everyone was showered and in bed (me.) We have had this lovely illustrated version for several years, waiting for our eldest, now 9 years old, to pick it up and discover it. We got impatient, so I told […]

Intimacies, or, How Lipgloss Led to my 13th CBR Review

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

by 2 Comments

I hadn’t heard of Katie Kitamura until there was a small online to-do about her lipgloss. Kitamura, in an interview with New York Magazine, included a $24 lipgloss in a listicle of “15 items she can’t live without.” My regular internet reading brought to me a Hot Take about Katie’s love of this lipgloss, and here’s the Hot Take: including this very silly item in her list is tone deaf (lipgloss in this economy!?), and furthermore, lipgloss has nothing to do with literature, so it’s […]



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