Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Book that Helped Influence a Movement

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

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Best for: Anyone interested in a straightforward exploration of a woman’s life under patriarchy. In this case, the patriarchy women experience in Korea. In a nutshell: Kim Jiyoung’s story, from birth through motherhood, and all the times her being a girl / woman has been held against her. Worth quoting: “It felt more like harassment or violence than pranks, and there was nothing she could do about it.” “It wasn’t that she didn’t have time – she didn’t have room in her head for other […]

Can you hear the horses? ‘Cause here they come

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

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Though we might not like to admit it, many of us threw our lot in with the mean girl against the “weird” girl when we were kids. We chose what seemed like the relative safety of popularity over being considered strange and outcast by our peers. This choice is what sends Regan, our protagonist, through her door and into her journey to the Hooflands in this sixth installment of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. This book can be viewed as a standalone as it doesn’t […]

They’re All My Friends, And They Died…

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

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I haven’t ugly cried over a book in a hot minute, but man, I sure ugly cried over this one.  This is one of those books that everyone recommends to you and for whatever reason you dig your feet in that it’s probably not going to be for you but you politely say, “Thanks for the recommendation” and then go on about reading anything but that book.  Does anyone else do that? And then invariably, when you sit down to read the book that your […]

Dwindle, Peak and Pine

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

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Birnam Wood are a collective of idealists. They roam around the New Zealand city in which they are based and grow vegetables on unused plots of lands, occasionally with permission of their owners. People volunteer bits of time and effort, driving around the city looking for mulch or abandoned pieces of plastic tarp to cover the plants, weeding the lots and collecting rainwater. Everything is recycled. Important events are democratically decided during a meeting known as a hui, in deference to the Maori, but ostensibly […]

Sail Away

Sunset by Jessie Cave

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London-based sisters Ruth and Hannah are very close in spite of everything – their difference in age, their difference in outlook on life. Tied together by an upbringing with two selfish, disinterested parents (one actor, one writer, neither of them very successful) they’ve taken two very different paths in life: Hannah is professionally successful, has a loving boyfriend, has started a charity for disadvantaged children, while Ruth is an art-school drop out whose longest relationship is with a man who doesn’t give her the time […]

Memorable but not fun for me

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

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I’d seen Yellowface (2023) by R.F. Kuang on various lists at the end of the year, which encouraged me to pick it up. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I was still surprised. I’ve read a number of books where plots are stolen or authors pretend to be something they’re not, and this one felt nothing like them. In fact, it felt more like a horror story than a literary story. June Hayward is an aspiring author. She has published one book that did not […]



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