Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Check out the first ever CBR Book Sale! Look through the list of books, and see if there's something for you.

About tiny_bookbot

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest.

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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 […]

How do we write good stories about storytelling

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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By happenstance, I wound up reading Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Erin Morgenstern’s follow-up to The Night Circus, The Starless Sea, within just weeks of one another. Digital library loan hold lists just shake out like that sometimes. And I was struck by how both were, at their heart, doing much the same thing, which is to say, telling stories about the power of telling stories, and doing so through an apparatus of doors that lead into other worlds/stories, and how the encounters with the […]

The “obstinate love” of memory

The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

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The first few days of April, I was supposed to be in Houston for the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies.  This community of academics is one of my favorites, and this conference is something I’ve come to look forward to, not least because there are pretty much always four poetry roundtables, conference sessions in which a small panel takes the whole audience through a discussion of a recent book of Irish poetry. Handouts of select poems are provided for everyone, and […]



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