Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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What are you worth?

84K by Claire North

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Theo is an average citizen in a fairly average dystopia. You know the kind: human rights violations are normal, everyone is scared, and the government wields unilateral power with virtually no opposition; or, to be more accurate, The Company (a mega corp) runs the government, which wields power with virtually no opposition. Everyday, Theo gets up, goes to work, calculates the financial costs of crimes to society, slaps a bill on the perpetrator, bothers absolutely no one, stands up not even for himself (to the […]

Drop-kick That Magic Lamp into Mount Doom

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin (editors)

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Short story collections are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you have to gnaw some nuts and chews to eventually find that chocolate truffle. That said, The Djinn Falls in Love is phenomenal. Six of the twenty-one stories are among the best short stories I have read. Ever. (Jhumpa Lahiri, I’m sorry to report that you’ve been bumped.)  The editors’s international ensemble of authors clearly did their research, populating their confident tales with every manner of djinn, jinn, and genie. Some lie in wait in […]

Complexity should be your excuse for inaction

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“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.” This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood.  And he’s […]

What would you do, if you could do it all over again?

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Like many of the books I read for my book club, I had not heard of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) by Claire North, and I probably would not have chosen it on my own. It didn’t help that the Amazon page said this book was for eight to twelve year-old kids. Fortunately, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August turned out to be a thought-provoking and entertaining book. Harry August is a special kind of person, which he discovers in his second life. He […]



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