Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest.

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“to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around”

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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CBR Bingo: Cold Well, the semester started, and away with it went my brain, or at least the part of it I use for writing. Still! I’ve been reading! So time to eke out a review or two before I crumble. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These came to my attention along with Audrey Magee’s The Colony when it was long listed for the Booker Prize. Magee didn’t make the shortlist, but Keegan did, and Small Things Like These has the honor of being the shortest novel to ever […]

“some perfect and unexplainable force of love”

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan

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CBR Bingo Square: Time I mentioned my summer of Irish fiction to my former mentor, and after recommending Dorothy Macardle to him, he enthusiastically recommended Donal Ryan, and especially his newest book, Strange Flowers, to me. Turns out one of the libraries where I hold a card had a digital copy available, so I checked it out (and ordered two of his previous novels) and got to work. Y’all, it was a good recommendation. The novel unfolds in distinct parts, each named for a book of […]

“Evil never goes unpunished…but the punishment is sometimes secret.”

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie

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CBR Bingo Square: Camel/Adaptation “Poirot,” I said. “I have been thinking.” “An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.” Alright, it’s not all just highfalutin’ theme reading over here (but the summer of Irish fiction rolls on), I am also cramming in books that are simply and purely for fun. Most of my Golden Age crime fiction reading for the past year or two has been working through Ngaio Marsh’s back catalog, but I’ve also been dabbling in some Christie here and there. And I really […]

life on the edge, in more ways than one

The Colony by Audrey Magee

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CBR Bingo Square: New Another entry in my summer of Irish fiction, but also one of the two Irish novels that made it onto this year’s Booker Prize longlist! (It’s a fun longlist this year, too, with both the oldest and youngest nominees, and the shortest book ever nominated.) I’m still waiting on Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These from the library, but I was able to check out Aubrey Magee’s The Colony almost immediately. And, oof, what a good novel. The novel is set on a […]

“How to quantify the quality of being alive?”

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

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CBR Bingo square: Bodies. I read this one closer to the start of my summer of Irish fiction, in an independent study with a student who needed just a couple more credits to graduate. I wanted something pretty contemporary to close out on, so I gave her a choice between Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars, which I’d already read, and The Wonder, which I had not. She picked The Wonder.  Donoghue has explained that this novel was inspired by the Victorian phenomenon of “fasting girls,” in which […]

“how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware”

Milkman by Anna Burns

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CBR Bingo Square: Monster Damn, y’all. Yes, my summer of Irish fiction continues. Though I’ve had Anna Burns’s Milkman on my shelf for…maybe close to two years?…it’s a read I just kept putting off, and then I let my Instagram friends decide what novel I was gonna read next and this was the winner. Burns won the Booker Prize for this novel in 2018, and I can see why. (Sidebar: As much as I appreciate Margaret Atwood, the daring and deftness of what Burns accomplishes here […]



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