Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I have a new hobby

The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan

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I’m not sure if it was because I was getting older or my interests just shifted, but back in 2019 I suddenly became fascinated with birding. It felt like a whole new world opened up simply because I started paying attention. Now that I have a dog, I spend more time walking her than going out with my camera looking for birds. However, I still look out for them, and I still find birds (all animals, really) fascinating. I’m officially hooked. Recently I stumbled on […]

“…believing in ghosts — that’s believing that love never dies.”

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

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Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses is a ghost story, a history, and a testament to the power of hope and love. This is only my second Amy Tan novel, but I must say, I am riveted by her storytelling. In this novel, as with The Kitchen God’s Wife, Tan manages to tell stories of the past that have a direct relationship to the present. This time, Tan reaches 100+ years into the past, to 1865, as she tells the story of Nunumu, the peasant […]

“See her name: Lady Sorrowfree, happiness winning over bitterness, no regrets in this world.”

The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan

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In the Chinese tale of the Kitchen God, a man named Zhang, who owes his wealth and success to the efforts of his wife Guo, grows tired of her and throws her aside for another woman. When he falls on hard times and becomes destitute, fate puts him back with Guo, but his shame leads to his death. In the afterlife, he is rewarded for his remorse by being made the Kitchen God, a sort of spy, susceptible to bribery, who bestows luck upon individuals. […]

“I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place.”

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I think I remember reading The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan when I was a kid. My mother must have bought it, and I picked it up because I would read anything and everything I could get my hands on–even when I was too young to really understand it. So when I saw it on my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40, I wasn’t sure I needed to read it again. In the end, I figured it was worth the […]

Mother, mother

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The Scapegoat – Mary Lee Settle This is the fourth book in the Beaulah Quinet, Mary Lee Settle’s history of West Virginia through the lens of conflicts ranging from the ousting of a Puritan partisan in the English Civil War (leading to immigration to America) to the settling and drawing of land parcels in the 18th century to a novel I haven’t read yet in the 1840s to this coal mining dispute in 1912 and finally to more or less contemporary times. Following one family, in […]

Amy Tan’s nonfiction

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I read The Joy Luck Club in college for a women’s literature course, and while it wasn’t my favorite book, it was certainly interesting. I do think Amy Tan gets pigeonholed quite a bit as a “Chinese” American writer, and while she writes about a heritage from China, it’s not exactly fair to think of the experiences she writes about as exclusive to Chinese-Americans, or even more broadly, Asian-Americans. I won The Opposite of Fate, a nonfiction collection, at my undergrad’s English Department annual Book […]



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