Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I almost couldn’t finish this book

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

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TW: Grooming, pedophilia, child abuse, sexual assault, teacher-student relationship. I first learned about this book after seeing a woman on the train reading it. The cover of this book drew me in and I borrowed it from the library a week later. I did not know what I was getting myself into. This book introduces us to titular protagonist, Vanessa; a young woman reeling in the blowback of her high school English teacher’s recent suicide after allegations of sexual abuse come out against him in the […]

full of sound and fury, signifying not quite as much as it could

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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I’m not going to bury the lede on this one: I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. The nutshell premise is undeniably cool: space fantasy with strong Pacific Rim vibes, in that you have these mecha-type constructs piloted by psychically-linked soldiers who are fighting terrible alien monsters, powering their robots through the power of their chi, but everything inflected strongly through Chinese history and mythology. Except the system is horribly corrupt: girl pilots (we’ll say girls because the protagonist always does, and […]

Does Crime Pay?

Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano by Andris Kurins and Joseph F. O'Brien

Sacred by Dennis Lehane

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I hadn’t meant to review these books together but I finished Sacred sooner than I anticipated and it just makes sense to cover them both in one review…   Boss of Bosses I just finished rewatching The Godfather in honor of its 50th anniversary and I decided to tackle this one because the agents applied the movie title as a sobriquet for Paul Castellano, the mob boss of the Gambino crime family who is perhaps most famous as being the guy in John Gotti’s way that got killed in […]

Let’s not go back there again

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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Join us now through May 21 for the #CannonBookClub Discussion of Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a multi-award winning young adult novel that takes on several heavy topics and does so admirably. Set in early 1950’s San Francisco, the story’s protagonist Lily Hu is a teenager with big dreams. Yet she faces a number of formidable obstacles related to her race, sex and sexual identity. Through Lily, Malinda Lo shows the reader how dangerous it […]

Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

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This is the second novel of the Rabbit Angstrom series by John Updike. I was born the year the third book came out, and the last book, plus the novella followed up 10 and 20 years later. This expansion can give a false impression that the books were always designed as a series. It may well be that that was what John Updike planned all along, but I am not certain of it. This book gives the clear impression of what he’s thinking though. Rabbit […]

I Claudius

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

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Poor poor pitiful me! Claudius is a kind of nephew to Caesar Augustus and born outside of Italy, but regardless, he’s still among the court, and eventually, as we know, will become emperor after Caligula. Claudius is also afflicted with a stammer and a limp, which both allows him to hide behind his two infirmities, but also forces him to the side of things. His stammer also causes most people in his life to believe he is not very smart. We know of course, from […]



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