Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Whatever happened to Interracial Love?

Whatever happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins

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I have read and reviewed this book before, but I reread it by listening to the audiobook, so I was thinking about it some more. This is a kind of collection that comes out from time to time, where the children or other literary executors from an artist work to get the writer’s work published posthumously. In this case, Kathleen Collins was primarily known as a filmmaker, but she died early in her life at 46 of cancer. In recent years, her two children were […]

A Trans-Austen Historical Romance

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

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I love reading Austen and the Brontë sisters. Jane Eyre is a favorite, even if Mr. Rochester is the worst and definitely killed his wife. But reading period romances used to remind me, in the back of my mind, that those stories weren’t written for people like me. It wouldn’t have been historically accurate for two queer people to get together and not be shunned by society, right? Or…maybe not. Gentleman Jack has been a breath of fresh air, with a main character based on […]

To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

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We won’t be able to go to the lighthouse tomorrow it seems. In this novel, we find ourselves in the Hebrides as a group of people are more or less on vacation. As with many Virginia Woolf novels, our narrative perspective flits around from person to person in a close, omniscient third person as they consider their lives in general, and on this trip specifically. Our main characters are a young painter named Lily Briscoe. We have the Ramsays, a married couple with eight children. […]

Toward the End of the Morning

Toward the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn

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This is one of those British novels from the 1960s that is trying to capture the changing tone and impulses in the country stemming from the end of the war and the institution of the welfare state, and of course, the end of Empire. The novel takes places in a dying, middling paper on Fleet Street, the slightly mythic part of London with the famous daily papers. Our two main character is a married man named John Dyson, who foolishly bought a mediocre house in […]

Red Dragon

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

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This is the first book in the Hannibal Lecter series. If you’ve seen the tv show Hannibal, then this is where they were headed before the show was cancelled. So we more or less begin in medias res with Will Graham, criminal profiler (I will use this as a shortcut), no longer works with the FBI because in his capture of Hannibal Lecter, which predates the novel, and now he’s married and living far away from DC. He has a sense that he’s going to […]

With Friends Like These

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

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Flighty, hippie-ish pottery teacher Sheba Hart and spinster English teacher Barbara Covett seem like an unlikely pair, probably because they are. Sheba is an upper-class woman married to an older man with whom she has two children, while Barbara has lived her whole life with only a cat for a companion. Sheba is open and intuitve and Barbara is an inflexible rule-follower. Their teaching styles too are quite different. Sheba struggles to maintain control over her students, let alone teach them anything, while Barbara’s classroom […]



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