Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Dangled and Suspended in America

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

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First review ever and a confession! As a recovering humanities graduate student, I’m using CB14 as a way to re-teach myself how to read for pleasure, though that phase sits uncomfortably with me. I’m not sure ‘reading for pleasure’ really covers the full scope of what reading used to do for me and what I hope it will do in the future. The feeling of pleasure doesn’t capture at all what I experienced after finishing Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, and that […]

America is in the Heart

America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan

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The newer edition of this book comes with a long introduction by the scholar E. San Juan Jr and then an additional shorter introduction by the novelist Elaine Castillo, known for her novel America is Not in the Heart. Both add some important and significant contributions to the novel. The scholarly introduction helps to place the novel critically and historically, while the writerly introduction helps to place the novel culturally within the continuum of Philippine-American literature. The novel itself is heavily autobiographicaly in its approach, […]

It’s Set in Scotland. Of Course it’s Bleak.

Knots and Crosses (Inspecor Rebus #1) by Ian Rankin

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Edinburgh, 1986. A number of young girls disappear. They’re abducted seemingly randomly, strangled and their corpses abandoned. All of Edinburgh’s police force is on top of it and so is John Rebus, a chain smoking, hard drinking former marine who now works as a burnt-out office drone for Edinburgh’s constabulary. It’s not that he doesn’t care, but the work he does is monotonous and neverending, and he’s far away from the action – at least, he thinks so. But someone keeps sending him letters, letters […]

Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon

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This book is not a micro-history of the post-Reconstruction South and Jim Crow Era in the leadup to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, but it does end up covering a lot of that territory well. The book instead focuses on the various forms of re-enslavement that various states saw in the 1880s-1910s or so, heavily focused on the debt peonage, where someone was imprisoned and enthralled to a specific person in order to work off a debt. This system, and it […]

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

Violeta by Isabel Allende

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Violeta, who was born during the Spanish influenza pandemic and turns one hundred years old during the coronavirus pandemic, writes a memoir to hand down to her grandson Camilo. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Isabel Allende, and in fact have several others of her books on hand, piled in the tottering tower that is my TBR list. However, this is the first book by her that I’ve read, and it did not reach the heights I was expecting. Not that this is […]

A workman-like entry into the In Death series

Forgotten In Death by J.D. Robb

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Somewhere along the way, I missed this particular entry in the In Death series, J.D. Robb’s long-running set of novels set in New York in the not-so-distant future. There’s a whole cast of recurring characters, and checking in on them feels a bit like visiting old friends. In this particular installment, Lt. Eve Dallas and her partner Peabody are called to a construction site when the body of a transient woman is found wrapped in plastic in a construction dumpster. The site is next door […]



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