Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Well-Crafted but Emotionally Distant

Passing by Nella Larsen

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Passing is about Irene and Clare, two light-skinned Black women who are both capable of passing as White. Irene only does so when it’s convenient, like getting into a fancy hotel, but Clare is fully immersed in her life as the wife of a racist White man who does not know that Clare is biracial. The two women were childhood friends, but in her late teens, Clare disappears from the neighborhood, and the novel begins when the two incidentally cross paths 12 years later. It’s a […]

Living in Her Shadow

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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Rebecca is often presented as a gothic novel, but it’s actually hard to pin down the genre. It has some gothic elements, some suspenseful elements, a marriage plot. Ultimately, I would characterize it as psychologically suspenseful litfic. The psychological suspense relates to the narrator, who remains unnamed for the entirety of the book. Twenty-one at the start of the novel, she is working as a lady’s “companion” in Monte Carlo, when she meets and falls in love with widower Maxim de Winter, and they marry within […]

An Early Work by Dostoevsky

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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If you’re interested in reading classic literature, this is a good one to start with. Clocking in at under 70 pages (as least according to my Kindle), this novella is told as the diary of an unnamed narrator recounting a few nights with a young woman in Petersburg. Our narrator meets Nastenka on a street one night after rescuing her from a man who was accosting her. He had previously observed her on the bank of a river and noticed her crying, but she ran […]

Who knew a book with “bleak” in the title could be so much fun? (with helpful charts!)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

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Bleak House has been brooding on my TBR list for years because, even though I’m a long-time Dickens fan, I was intimidated by the length and by what I perceived would be a weighty novel. I’m ecstatic that I overcame my hesitance, because this novel was more fun than a mariachi band on a roller coaster. Sure, about 9 people die, but you can’t make gruel without smashing a few oats, right? There are so many characters that the death toll amounts to maybe 12%, and […]

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice”

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

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There’s always classics I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten to yet, and summers are in part a chance to chip away at that long, long list (so many books! so little time). E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View was the latest to be ticked off the list, and it’s a nice one to get around to. Forster’s second novel, after Where Angels Fear to Tread, it’s a brisk, breezy, Austenesque volume that comes in under 200 pages: quick, spritely, and while it clearly […]

Too much damage

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

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Osamu Dazai is an esteemed author of classical Japanese literature, but he was a troubled man in real life.  Like a lot of classical Western authors, he squandered his money on alcohol and prostitutes, and ultimately, died by suicide at a relatively young age.  The tortured genius thing is not just a Western trope, I guess. This book, his last before his death, is purported to be fiction, but is almost biographical in how the beats of the story reflect his real life.  So maybe […]



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