Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Best left to the confines of a college writing course

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

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When I saw this title at Target, I immediately grabbed it, read the opening lines, and added it to my to-read list. A town full of people suddenly starting to all turn black one day? I wanna see where he goes with this. Yet, with all that potential, all the doors you open up to yourself with that concept, he instead whittled it down to a pretty personal story about a man and a woman and their parents. To me, this felt like the sort […]

Post Office

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

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For good reason, a lot of people hate this book, and Charles Bukowski at large. The book is very hateable for a lot of reasons. It’s often misogynistic, slightly less so racist, but still plenty. The main character is a real piece of shit. He rapes someone in the first third of a novel, and it’s almost but not quite played for laughs. And at the very least he’s incredibly grotesque. At the same time, rereading this, especially in audiobook form, I get more about […]

Timequake

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

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We’ve had a bunch of timeloop movies and stories by this time, but they always end up more or less doing the same thing. Working toward fixing the problem of the timeloop, which is almost always one single day. Even the game Deathloop, which I loved, did more or less the same thing. In this novel though the timeloop is a solid ten years, and more so, no one is allowed to do anything different, and the only thing that changes is what people are […]

Well, we aren’t calling you truthers…

Family of Liars by E. Lockhart

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Right out of the gate, I’ve gotta be honest and say I forget most of We Were Liars, the book this is the prequel story to. I distinctly remember the grand reveal, the “we were liars” moment, catching me wildly off guard, but I only have the loosest idea of what occurred in those pages. Thankfully, this prequel book isn’t the type to rely heavily upon having intimate knowledge of the other book to appreciate it. I’d probably have enjoyed it plenty more if the […]

What if we’re underwhelmed instead?

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

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Karen Joy Fowler’s book starts in the middle with a bang, with her main character, Rosemary Cooke, away at college and undergoing some youthful rebellion. Rosemary tells us of what seems like her idyllic early life back in the mid-west: she has two loving parents, an older brother, Lowell, and a younger sister, Fern. Lowell is someone to look up to while Fern is Rosemary’s shadow half- they are raised to do everything together, dressed in matching outfits and speak in their own language. Rosemary […]

Data for supervillains

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

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Back in April 2012, I went to see The Avengers at my local theater. It was one of the most fun movie-going experiences I’ve ever had. I went by myself but I was definitely not alone – it was a packed house, even during a matinee, on a weekend, in my small town. In later years, I would see most MCU movies in the theater, in similar circumstances, but The Avengers was the first and it was fun. With age and, you know, everything, it’s a lot […]



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