Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!” I am rereading this for about the 10th time I think. I read it in high school and college, and then a few times since. I am also thinking about teaching it this year in replacement to another teacher teaching Never Let Me Go. This book has plenty of sex and drugs too, but it’s a little more indirect and the specific language […]

The Drowning Kind

The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon

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I don’t get why so many people hated this ending. I thought it was true to the book and for once you didn’t have an author shy away from things. I will say one thing though, I don’t think it’s the “true” ending. I think it’s the ending that Jax hopes for in the end. I thought this was a great horror novel and loved us going back and forth from the present with Jax to the past with her great grandmother Ethel. I also […]

Worn Out Wife Seeks New Life

Worn Out Wife Seeks New Life by Carmen Reid

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It gets two stars because it started off so well. And then it went really downhill. I liked Tess a lot and thought River was a user honestly. I didn’t like her, not even when we get to the end of the book. I think what got me is that the swap was really unfair. River got a whole very nice house, fully stocked, with Tess’s husband listening to her going on and on about herself. Tess had to clean up River’s place for like […]

Sweet summer reading

What the Fireflies Knew by Kia Harris

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In this coming of age tale, Kenyatta (KB) spends 1995, the summer she turns 11, with her Granddaddy in Lansing. She and her older sister Nia are leaving their home in Detroit for the summer following the death of their father. Their mother brings them to their grandfather’s house and then, without warning, leaves them there – and KB must navigate life after the traumatic death of one parent and the unexplained and hopefully temporary absence of another. KB’s life is full of warmth and […]

White Butterfly

White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

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The third novel in the Easy Rawlins novels, this book begins with Rawlins being confronted in his house by several local police and politicians. Rawlins is married now, and in the last book he adopted (under the table) a young Mexican boy who now lives with them. He’s also got an infant daughter by way of his wife. Anyway, Rawlins tells us that this is not typical to be confronted by police in his living room, where he is being coerced into helping them with […]

Inside Mr Enderby

Inside Mr Enderby by Anthony Burgess

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The first of a series of four novels written within a 20 year span in which a kind of literary alter ego for Anthony Burgess takes center stage. Enderby is a middle-aged poet, a consummate bachelor who lives with his stepmother, and composes his poetry (which is published to derision and mockery) on the toilet. When his stepmother dies, he is sent on a spiral where at one point he ends up very drunk in a bar adlibbing poetry to a woman whose husband would […]



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