Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About matt_thac

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White, man, feminist, Muslim, living in a country that's not where he's from, and constantly having to navigate his way in other languages and cultures. Any one and all of these at anytime and less confused that than appears.

matt_thac's Reviews:

Do We Ever Really Know Our Parents?

The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

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It sometimes feels likes a writer has used their work of fiction as a cathartic exorcism of their demons. The Nights are Quiet in Tehran feels like Shida Bazyar is laying bare parts of her own upbringing as the child of political refugees from Iran living in Germany. This gives the book a warmer, more personal touch than might have been achieved by another.   This book plays with form, switching 4 times between time periods and narrators as we follow the lives of Behzad, […]

Tick Follows Tock Follows Tick Follows Tock: Late Stage Rushdie

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

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  Salman Rushdie has always played with time, but as his own clock starts to wind down it sees him more reflective than before. There are 5 stories in all, 3 novellas, and 2 short stories and 2 of these have already appeared in print in the New Yorker. Most of these stories were written after Rushdie’s very intimate brush with death in 2022 and the emotional weight of this event and his life can be felt through them all. It feels like his most […]

We, Ourselves, and Us

Namesake by N. S. Nuseibeh

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It’s sometimes a strange feeling to live overseas. No matter how settled you feel, how well you feel you’ve gotten under the skin of where you are, there are always voices whispering how you’re not of that place. These whispers talk of ancestral roots and ideas of home that Nuseibeh constructs into a series of essays linking to the fierce Islamic warrior, Nusaybah.   Nuseibeh explores her own identity as much as the near mythical figure of Nusaybah.  Navigating multiple identities, a woman, a secular […]

Grief, Guilt, & 21 Days at Sea

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

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Weaving fragments of timelines is always a risky move for a writer. Moving backwards and forwards through the protagonist’s life can be confusing and gimmicky, taking a skilled story-teller to avoid us asking if it would be a better plot if it were linear. With Michael Ondaatje, we’re in such talented hands.  The Cat’s Table weaves a slow, reflective tale of a group of friends, migrants from Sri Lanka to Britain and from there the wider world. Ondaatje uses the same spatial anchor to keep […]

Food Glorious Food: Eating the “Other” in 1930s Taiwan

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi

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Anglophones miss how central food is to most other cultures. Our conversational starters revolve around the weather as a way of breaking the ice with a stranger, whereas food has become just a source of fuel. In many other languages “Have you eaten yet?” as a greeting is a way to metaphorically (and sometimes literally) break bread. In Taiwan Travelogue, food brings together a Japanese travel writer, Aoyama, and her Taiwanese translator, Chizuru, but also seeks to highlight their different tastes. Ideas of the high-culture […]

One Thousand and One Nights… But Horny?

One thousand and one nights by Hanan Al-Shaykh

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  The Arabian Nights feels like an orientalist’s wet dream. A loose collection of stories from across South and South West Asia, it was first translated from Arabic by the othering gaze of a Frenchman, giving us many of the tropes peddled across literature from eroticised harams to conniving conmen. This re-telling sits in a strange liminal space, written by a Lebanese writer living in London, a collection of 19 tales repackaged for an adult audience. And an Adult audience it is. The women in […]



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