Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Brutally beautiful historical fantasy

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang

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I was immediately drawn to this book, but struggled with eyeball reading, so I was so glad when I got an advance listening copy as well, especially so I wouldn’t be butchering the Chinese words and intonations. This is really intense and deals with a lot of really difficult topics, and it’s hard to say any of the characters (though especially Ba) were likable, but the ending left me with a feeling of hope and healing. Told through three (four?) perspectives, A Beast Slinks Towards […]

Banned in China doesn’t mean what people think it does.

Marrying Buddha by Wei Hui

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  The Community Bookshelf inspired me to reflect on books I’d read around the times I was living in a place. A bit of Googling, which wasn’t really a verb when I read Shanghai Baby, I came across this sequel. Marrying Buddha continues the story of Coco in (probably) largely fictional auto-biographical tale of her bouncing once again between 2 lovers, her Japanese boyfriend Muju, and a “George Clooney lookalike” Nick. I’d almost forgotten how much of a sex symbol George was in the late ’00s. […]

Dangerously in Love

My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

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My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas was a historical romance book club pick from The Ripped Bodice. I sped-read the first half and didn’t return to it last year. And then in February, I remembered, and it was so worth finishing. Ying-Ying, aka Catherine Blade, is a badass. She was trained in martial arts because her guardian/stepfather, Da-Ren, was a Chinese warlord. She makes an enemy of Lin, a dangerous assassin, who relentlessly hunts her across the globe. When the story begins, she is hiding […]

Yes, There Are No Scripts. So It Is Written in the Script

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

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Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Award, which is Australia’s most prestigious literary award. It had also been sitting on my reader long before it got nominated. Reading about Lu’s win was the kick in the pants I needed to pick the book up and give it read through. And I’m really quite ashamed that I hadn’t done it sooner.  Ghost Cities is an imaginative and bonkers novel weaving together two tangentially related plots. The first unfolds in a […]

Power and the Written Word

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

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I once had a housemate who tried to teach me some simplified Chinese written characters (hanzi). Nothing too complex, just me 我, you 你, coffee 咖啡 and tea 茶, so on and so forth. But even with such an easy lesson, I realized that some connections were harder to make than others. I was able to match the the vocalization to the meaning: Wǒ is I/me. And I would see 我 written on the page and go ahead and think ‘yes, that’s I/me’. But that […]

The boy who became a fighter

Worthy : The Brave and Capable Life of Joseph Pierce by Andrea Wang

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I read a book that at first glance, I figured wouldn’t be “all that” as American Civil War stories are known, people of color are having their stories told and Asian people are having their stories told. How could this book be different? Well, when author Andrea Wang and illustrator Youa Vang got together they combined the three elements and made a unique, well-thought out story of one man and how he triumphed over adversity. That man was Joseph Pierce. His birth name has been […]



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