Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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In India

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

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I know next to nothing about India. Never been there. Have a few friends/acquaintances who are but don’t know enough about their experiences to speak intelligently on what the country is like. This may have been the first fictional novel I’ve read set in the book so I went into it with eyes open. Take that all with a grain of salt because I don’t know what the perspective is from actual Indians on the book. But as a deconstruction of the country of India, […]

Into the Light

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

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I first read this novel more than 10 years ago when it was published (2008) and I wanted to see if it held up before we watched the Netflix adaptation. Briefly: it sure does. White Tiger follows Balram Halwai, a lower caste man from small-town India, as he crafts his own rise to power through unscrupulous means.  The book is framed as a series of letters from Balram to the Chinese President, ostensibly for the two of them to revel in the entrepreneurship of their […]

“A man without rights in this world is not freed from his responsibilities.”

Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

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My mom is an unrepentant fast-forwarder. Any movie montage, car chase, fight scene, or any extended section of a movie with no dialogue is gonna get fast-forwarded through. (I grew up thinking this was totally normal and acceptable, and have had several boyfriends go “WAIT, what are you DOING?!?!” when I started fast-forwarding through a scene I thought was skippable.) This book, while totally lovely, could definitely have used a fast-forward button. Danny (Dhananjaya) is from Sri Lanka, living illegally in Australia. He came on […]

A novel about cricket and sexuality in India

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I was a huge fan of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, so I was intrigued to hear that he’d released a new novel—and focused on cricket. I’ll confess that I know very little about cricket, and what little I do know is based on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. That said, you don’t really need to know a whole lot to get invested in the story. It’s an interesting contemporary tale, even if it doesn’t have quite the same original spark that fueled The White Tiger. Selection […]

The Uncaged Tiger

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My friend C and I exchange a lot of book ideas. We started our PhDs in the same class, we ended up choosing the same literary subfield, and we have the same dissertation director. She’s read some of my primary texts, and I realized I’ve not read all of hers. The White Tiger was in her list, plus I needed to up my Anglophone game. So I decided to give it a try. Balram Halwai, the White Tiger of this book, is a young entrepreneur […]

When neighbors stop being polite…

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“In the old days, if a builder had a problem, that problem would end up in pieces in the wet concrete: it became part of the building it had tried to obstruct. A bit of calcium was good for the foundations. But those days were gone: the lawless days of the 1980s and ’90s.” (321) The White Tiger was one of my favorite books of the year when I read it back in 2008. For that reason, I knew I would have to eventually get […]



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