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:

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 […]

“Life was a bitch. Love was also a bitch.”

The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue by Edna O'Brien

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CBR14 Bingo: Scandal “But we want young men. Romance. Love and things,” I said, despondently. Edna O’Brien is kind of a giant in Irish fiction, so it was kind of embarrassing, really, that I hadn’t read any of her work before this summer. (Yes, this is another installment in my Summer of Irish Fiction.) She’s now in her nineties and only recently retired, and she’s published steadily ever since her first novel, Country Girl (included in this volume), which came out in 1960 and immediately scandalized […]

“a responsible witness to the miracle of the ordinary soul”

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

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CBR Bingo: Minds Confession first: I’ve had this book kicking around on my shelves–a signed copy, no less!–since 2016, when Sebastian Barry came to give a reading at my grad school institution, an event timed to coincide with the centenary of the Easter Rising. (Small brag: I got to have barbecue with him and historian Roy Foster, along with my dissertation director and a couple other grad students. He was very nice, and when visiting American cities he likes to see what he can find […]

a collection of poisonous surfaces

Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo

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CBR Bingo Square: Snake I don’t read a lot of short stories these days except for work, so when the description of Lisa Taddeo’s Ghost Lover piqued my interest, I went ahead and put a library hold on it. I felt optimistic: I’d liked both Carmen Maria Machado’s and Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collections when I read them in the past couple years. Well. Taddeo’s a solid writer, for sure, but I did not like this collection much at all. I stubbornly finished so I could […]



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