Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Osso Buco, You Say? Jambalaya? Why, yes!

My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee

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This book seemed to me, like a mashup of two separate stories – both starring the same protagonist, but in very different settings and genres. One of them I was enjoying very much initially but by the end, it was definitely heading off the rails.  The other started off fairly nondescript, but then started to find its mojo, and I ended up liking that one very much.  Weird. Our hero, Tiller, is a bored college student from New Jersey.  He gets swept up by a […]

I thought I was keeping my work secret from her, an effort that was getting easier all the time.

Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

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This book has a lot going on. Chang-Rae Lee is one of those authors who always seems just to be out there waiting for me to read his work. I’ve read his “newer” novel On Such a Full Sea years ago when it first came out and I’ve thought about it a lot since. This book looks like it’s going to be one type of book and in some ways it is, but then it’s a very very different kind of book throughout. The title of […]

A re-read that improved my experience

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Something that has perplexed me as I’ve been gathering texts for my next research project has been the multi-cultural perspective within the dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel framework, besides Nnedi Okorafor’s (and even she veers more into Afro-futurism, which is fairly different, generically speaking). Thankfully, I remembered that I had read Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea two years ago for CBR7, and I decided it might be time to give him a second chance. Wow. I am so glad I did, because I think […]

On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures.

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The reviews for this book tend to focus on how sad it is. And it is a sad book, but I don’t find it to be a dreary one. The world of this future is not a hellish landscape, although it can be bleak, but instead has a changed focus. This novel is the story of a girl named Fan who leaves her enclave of B-More, an agricultural and fish-farming conglomerate on the east coast in the middle-distant future. She leaves because her companion, her […]

A dystopian novel that reads like an epic poem. Not sure that’s a compliment, in this case.

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My first exposure to Chang-rae Lee was an essay, “Mute in an English-Only World,” found in my Composition reader at my PhD institution. I taught it my first year teaching and realized that it had been taught for the last ten years. I received a suspiciously large amount of papers on the essay, which made me realize there were way too many papers floating around about the essay. So I had to ban it. The essay was not my favorite, either. It was somewhat hard […]

MelBivDevoe’s CBR Review #4 – We Must Take the Current When It Serves

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  In Chang-rae Lee’s dystopian vision of the future, America is divided into three classes living in three extremely different types of settlements.  At the top are the Charters, protected cities in which the rich and successful dwell, spending their money on whatever fancy suits their whims.  These people also are referred to as “Charters,” so the name can mean either a place or a person who lives there.  Next are the facilities, former cities that have been turned into processing plants that provide the […]



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