Cannonball Read 12

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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Immense beauty and infinite kindness

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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I first read Susanna Clarke in my senior year of undergrad. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was a new release, and I decided I could not wait for the paperback edition to read it: I lugged that fat hardback around for two weeks as I slowly worked my way through it, savoring it, never wanting it to end, which I suspect is how many of us who read it felt. Clarke created a world that felt so real, right down to the prose style, that the […]

The waking dream of Alice Oswald’s sea-poems

Nobody by Alice Oswald

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Alice Oswald’s Memorial is one of my favorite poetry collections. Depending on whether you are looking at the American or UK cover, it is either a “version” or an “excavation” of Homer’s Iliad, and the trick that Oswald so deftly pulls off is that she only translates the deaths, interspersed with some of the epic similes. Gone is all the plot, the rage of this man and the glory of that: she pulls all these characters together in the democracy of death. The book is marked by […]

A missed opportunity in a creepy, engaging story

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I admit, I’d let The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires slide off my radar almost as soon as I saw the news of its publication. It looked a lot more True Blood with a dash of Steel Magnolias, and if I’m going to read about vampires these days, I want something real weird like Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, on in a queer revisionist take on Harry Potter, like Rainbow Rowell’s Wayward Son books. (Book 3 needs to hurry up and get here already.) But then a friend of mine mentioned […]

A book and a protagonist who are many things at once

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood is nothing if not a hardworking novelist, and often something of a genre chameleon: she has made her work in science fiction with the MadAddam trilogy, dystopian fiction with The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, literary retellings with The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, and historical fiction with works like The Blind Assassin. Alias Grace, her 1996 Booker-finalist novel, is another of her forays into historical fiction, and it showcases Atwood at the top of her game, with a subtle, elusive narrative that employs narrative uncertainty and distinctive character voices, as well as […]

An Native American novel “tender with significance”

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

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“The sun was low in the sky, casting slant regal light. As they plodded along, the golden radiance intensified until it seemed to emanate from every feature of the land. Trees, brush, snow, hills. She couldn’t stop looking. The road led past frozen sloughs that bristled with scorched reeds. Clutches of red willow burned. The fans and whips of branches glowed, alive. Winter clouds formed patterns against the fierce gray sky. Scales, looped ropes, the bones of fish. The world was tender with significance.” It […]



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