Cannonball Read 13

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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Crossdressing, murder, and blackmail, oh my!

The Body at the Tower (The Agency #2) by Y. S. Lee

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(Note: mild spoilers for Book #1, A Spy in the House.) This has been a fun series to read in the evenings when winding down: the plotting is nicely propulsive, historical London is very well-centered, and Mary Quinn (née Lang) remains an engaging protagonist. This sophomore entry in Lee’s The Agency series picks up about a year after the first book left off: she is now a full member of the all-ladies investigatory firm concealed within Miss Scrimshaw’s School for Girls, and her two superiors […]

“It didn’t seem I could know it until I had lived it”

In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming

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This is the first novel I was nervous about teaching this semester. I knew Anand and Paton would go down pretty easy with my students, but this debut novel by George Lamming, originally published in 1953, is a shaggy dog of a book, with frequent stylistic shifts, and with its main character (only named as G, and loosely based on Lamming himself) often disappearing for multiple chapters at a stretch. Sometimes in this book, loving parents beat their kids, and friends fall out over dumb […]

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.”

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

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“Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.” Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel that gets read in schools a lot, probably because it has a vaguely To Kill a Mockingbird-like feel, but international, with the action moved to South Africa. The Reverend Stephen Kumalo, a black Anglican priest who lives in a rural […]

“That’s the word! Untouchable!”

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

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This semester, I’m teaching a course on global anglophone literature, i.e. literature written in English that’s neither British, Irish, nor American. (Nor, for that matter, Canadian, Australian, or New Zealander, much as I wanted them! And not quite postcolonial fiction, since our first three novels are still within the late colonial period.) Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, originally published in 1935, was the first novel we covered for the class (it narrowly edged out Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi), and what a beautiful entry into the subject it […]

For a YA Victorian-era mystery with diversity, turn here

A Spy in the House (The Agency #1) by Y. S. Lee

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I am apparently just reading a lot of books set in Victorian England lately. I choose not to question this, and simply to embrace it while it lasts, because I’ll find another miniature streak to go on at some point. Besides, this is paired with quite a bit of Irish fiction that is not set in the 19th century, so I’m fine, right? At any rate, Y. S. Lee’s A Spy in the House follows the adventures of Mary Quinn, a young woman who is saved from […]



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