Cannonball Read 18

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.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

“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 […]

a bold swing but a tough miss

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

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Tootle Tsamaase’s Womb City showed up on several lists for most anticipated 2024 science fiction, and the Afrofuturist dystopia angle of it sounded exciting and different. And clearly also a work with a feminist eye towards women’s autonomy, but providing a different angle than standard issue Western white feminism. I had really high hopes for this one; science fiction is such a potent genre for examining political questions and this looked so fresh and distinctive. The plot summary was also compelling: Nelah lives in a futuristic […]

“our evening stories pushing back the brutal dark”

Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara by Vona Groarke

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I hit burnout sometime around idk when last year, and while I kept on reading, I definitely stopped writing reviews. But now a new semester is staring me in the face, and I have a project I want to procrastinate on, so here’s a review, because I have been reading like a fiend these first two weeks of January, and this might be my favorite thing I’ve read so far this year (might sound like faint praise but I am 13 books deep already). I’ve […]

How we got here (to the summer of strikes)

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan

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CBR Bingo Square: Politics I read Maureen Ryan’s piece in Variety about the hellish writers room of Lost back in the spring, an excerpt lifted from this book as advance publicity, and it did the job of making me very curious about what else she had to say about power politics in Hollywood, particularly as it pertains to people who are not in front of the camera. Ryan does also have plenty to say about how actors are treated (see her discussion of Sleepy Hollow and all that went […]

monsters and miracles in Mexico

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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CBR Bingo Square: In the Wild I do love a good retelling, and early sci-fi seems especially ripe for the revisionist takes, given how centered they are on white male protagonists, and how absent the perspectives of women and POC are. So the idea of Moreno-Garcia’s follow-up to Mexican Gothic being a retelling of The Island of Doctor Moreau was a very appealing one, especially with moving the action to the Yucatan peninsula and engaging with Mexico’s history of indigenous resistance. Carlota, the eponymous daughter, is one of […]



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