Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

White People

White People by Allan Gurganus

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One of the weirdest literary phenomenon is when a writer puts out some piece of writing that just absolutely captures the attention of readers, and then there’s a follow-up scramble to capitalize on that success. In some cases, it’s downright embarrassing for those involved when say a drawerful of juvenilia gets published and ultimately kills the momentum and even sometimes the writers’ career as a consequence. Sometimes a not great second novel appears soon thereafter, and it turns out it was written long before the […]

Sliver

Sliver by Ira Levin

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I grabbed this book at a book fair for free. It was not free so much as the book fair had a deal where you could bring a bag in and they would charge you five dollars to fill the bag up. So this book was more or less free, and given how thin the book was, and how over stuffed the bag was, like I said, it’s essentially free. Wow, you’re thinking, you’re really spending a lot of time explaining just how free this […]

Election and Tracy Flick can’t Win (and Little Children)

Election by Tom Perrotta

Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

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Election I wanted to reread Election, even though I read it a few years ago, because they produced an audiobook version of it in connection to the sequel coming out. Election is still very very funny and insightful, and one of the few books that I read where it actual feels like the person writing it has worked in a school, or spent enough time with a school to narrate the experience. It’s also a very outdated time capsule of a book now. The sentiments […]

The Old Gringo and Bierce stories

The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes

The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and Other Stories by Ambrose Bierce

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The Old Gringo This is a 1985 novel by Carlos Fuentes. It takes place in the middle of the Mexican Revolution and begins with a stranger coming to town. The stranger is referred to as the “Gringo” or the “”old Gringo” for the entirety of the novel, and we’re told first what everyone in the town assumes about him, some of which ends up being true. We learn that he is tall and straight-backed, that he is washed, shaved, and perfumed, and that he has […]

Scars of war and colonialism

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

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I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a copy of The Hacienda since January. I expected gothic horror, and what I got was a full-on haunted house story. Set in Mexico just after the Mexican War of Independence, the scars of that war are visible everywhere. Beatriz, our main character, is forced to move in with relatives after her father, a general on the wrong side of the war, is disappeared and their house burned down in the night. Beatriz sees her only hope […]

Y’all Remember

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

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The novel The Deep was written by Rivers Solomon, but the origin of the story is actually more diverse. Drexciya, an experimental duo, created a sonic template for the story, which was expanded on by clipping. in a song titled “The Deep” and then transformed again into this short but extremely compelling novel. The story revolves around an imagined community of beings called wajinru, born of unimaginable tragedy. Imagine the real horror of pregnant women on slave ships, who were tossed overboard into the ocean […]



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