Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

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“a hobbastyu was both a turbulent sea and a great difficulty, or dilemma”

Clear by Carys Davies

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The idea of a historical fiction novel that sends you repeatedly running to Wikipedia usually sounds like a hefty tome, some kind of sweeping epic like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. But Carys Davies’s Clear is a tiny little jewel box of a novel, not even 200 pages long (or just a hair over three hours for the audiobook I listened to). But Davies takes you into the Scottish clearances, the 1843 schism in the Scottish Presbyterian church, Scots dialect, the dying Norse-derived languages of the northernmost […]

an overly-rosy wintry fairy tale

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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The description of The Snow Child kinda intrigued me when it first came out, and I do love novels that put a fresh spin on old fairy tales. Then a friend mentioned loving it, so I thought, why not, and  put it on my digital library holds, because it’d be fine as a dog-walking read, probably. The novel focuses on an older couple, Jack and Mabel, who moved to Alaska and are homesteading there in the 1910s following heartbreaks in their former life on the East […]

“Nothing makes sense until it makes sense in the body”

Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant

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National poetry month demands some poetry reviews, and fortunately there’s no shortage of good poetry to engage with. Jason Allen-Paisant won last year’s T.S. Eliot Prize for his second collection, Self-Portrait As Othello. Allen-Paisant is originally from Jamaica, but also studied in Paris and earned his PhD in medieval literature at Oxford, and his familiarity with moving through these more rarefied, majority-white spaces in Europe prompts, in part, the identification with the figure of Othello that forms the center of this collection. Self-Portrait As Othello really […]

Augustine and his women

Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper

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Kate Cooper’s Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions came to my attention via an article on the shortlist for the 2023 Cundill History Prize. (BTW, that’s a good-looking group of books, if you’re a history nerd.) I teach Augustine’s Confessions every spring, but always find it a bit of hard going in a literature class, so anything that might help me out, I try to look at. (Last spring it was Natalie Carnes’s Motherhood: A Confession which is also fantastic.) Cooper’s central idea […]

“Dear friends I cannot rescue you”

If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton

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I heard about this collection last summer, in a context that will sound a little insufferable, i.e. at a poetry roundtable at an Irish Studies conference where we were discussing a fairly experimental work, but bear with me: someone brought up this collection as a poetry collection that, yes, was concerned with place, as so much poetry is, but one of those places was the digital world of Super Mario Bros. Well, that got my attention. But also I was tired AF from jet lag so […]

“I am still here but the I is different”

Ransom by David Malouf

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Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world. It’s me, an absolute sucker for classical retellings. There’s the obvious vogue of them going on right now, between Jennifer Saint and Claire North and Madeline Miller and Pat Barker &etc, but there’s also plenty of preceding ones, and when I learned (altogether too late) about David Malouf’s Ransom, I had to read it to see if it […]



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