Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Robert Isaksson from the next village over was a reindeer killer.”

Stolen: A Novel by Ann-Helen Laestadius, trans. Rachel Willson-Broyles

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CBR15passport books from different countries (Sweden/Sapmi) Stolen, by Ann-Helen Laestadius, is a novel that is dark, disturbing and based in reality. It is the fictional story of Elsa, a 9-year-old Sami girl, who witnesses the brutal killing of her reindeer calf and is then threatened with death by the man who did it. But Stolen is also the real story of the Sami, an indigenous minority whose lives, culture and history are tied to herding reindeer and who have been persecuted by their neighbors for […]

You got spunk Mazie

Mazie’s Amazing Machines by Sheryl Haft

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Mid-September 2023 will see Mazie’s Amazing Machines by Sheryl Haft and Jeremy Holmes. And I will be finding a finished copy. Not so much because I loved this book, but I need to have the final product in hand and not read online via a reader copy, as that was not the way to read it (at least for me). I need to feel this book, and slowly explore the details that hide when you are reading on a small phone screen. The idea of […]

My fellow penguins, countrybirds, lend me your flippers

The King Penguin by Vanessa Roeder

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Everyone thinks they are special, and penguins are no different. Especially when their name is Percival, and they are a King Penguin. And in the story aptly named, The King Penguin, we see how one penguin realizes that it is not a kingdom that he rules, but a community that he belongs in. In a simple fiction story by Vanessa Roeder, we learn a little about penguin names, some scientific facts (other animals seem to want to eat penguins, a lot), and some terribly rude […]

Some Shorts (Evelyn Waugh (1); Italo Calvino (1); Henry James (1); Stephen Graham Jones (1); Cassandra Khaw(1); John Grisham (1); CW Longbottom (1)

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Henry James by A Tragedy of Error

Midnight Caller by Stephen Graham Jones

Don't Turn on the Lights by Cassandra Khaw

The Tumor by John Grisham

Tears of the Anaren by CW Longbottom

Village of Islands by Jim Shepard

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The Loved One “All the day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the west, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean” I rented the first disc of Six Feet Under from Blockbuster just as soon as the dvds of the first season came out. I remember that one of the first scenes of the show, and the first season of the show was weird, like the ways that the first season of Sex […]

Fay Weldon

The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Fay Weldon

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“Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.” Another reread for me from grad school. For whatever reason I watched the movie version of this book several times as a kid. It had Roseanne Barr as the title character, with Meryl Streep as Mary Fisher and Ed Begley as Bobbo. In the novel, Ruth’s husband Bobbo is going to leave her for Mary Fisher. Mary Fisher is […]

Natalie Haynes (4)

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

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” I see you. I see all who men call monsters.” This is the newest novel by Natalie Haynes, whose other recent books A Thousand Ships and Pandora’s Jar I also read this year. This is a novel and is structured more or less like A Thousand Ships, which takes on the broadest view of a given myth (in that book The Iliad) and tells it from multiple perspectives, not necessarily tackling the narrative in strict order. You can guess from the title and the […]



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