Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I wanted to be the monster that kills other monsters.

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

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Untethered Sky tells a lot of story in 160 pages while also feeling unrushed. Ester tells us her story with occasional bits of foreshadowing to let us know that we are hearing about something that happened in the past. How distant the past, I couldn’t tell. While I was fully invested in Ester’s story, Lee maintains an emotional distance between the story and the reader. The story opens with the moment Ester meets Zahra. Zahra is a fledgling roc, an enormous bird of prey stolen […]

A Plot Within A Plot

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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Imagine being a writing professor at a small community college. Your own novel had meager success but it certainly feels like your chance of fame and fortune are rapidly dwindling.  Enter a young man named Evan.  He doesn’t want or need your help with his writing. He has the best plot, one completely new, one that doesn’t follow a single trope.  You read a few pages and he’s right, it is totally different than anything you’ve ever read, depressingly you wished you had though of the […]

Doris Lessing

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

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“Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that was what they had been waiting for.” A reread for me that I liked better than I thought the first time I read it, but still not as much as I might have. This novel follows a young couple meeting, getting married, and beginning to have children. The first few children go more or less well enough, but they begin to start […]

Kurt Vonnegut (1)

God Bless you, Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

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“A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.” This is another reread for me, and one that grew in my estimation quite a bit I think. I might be unable to read all mass market paperbacks anymore as my age, my eyesight, and patience (and attention span) wanes, so my first read through was cursed I think. It makes me realize I need […]

Margaret Atwood (3)

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

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“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” This is a reread of Margret Atwood’s Booker Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin, which was published in 2000, a few years after Alias Grace. I first read it after reading The Handmaid’s Tale for a class, and then Oryx and Crake on my own, and while it has some science fiction within the walls of the novel, this was my first realization that Margaret Atwood wrote other kinds of […]

Barry Unsworth (1)

Morality Play by Barry Unsworth

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“It was a death that began it all and another death that led us on.” There’s a whole sub-genre of medieval mystery novels, but there’s probably fewer medieval mystery novels about medieval mystery plays. Or in this case a mix of morality and mystery plays. Though I would bet within the 20 plus Brother Cadfael novels, there’s at least one about morality and mystery plays  This is a short novel by Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker Prize for his very long novel Sacred Hunger, […]



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