Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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‘lines of a story I’ll rewrite and understand on a future rereading’

Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

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CBR11bingo: The Collection My first experience with Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli was her evocative, heart-wrenching run-down of a questionnaire she had to translate when interviewing children seeking asylum in the US for the New York court system. I still think of Tell Me How It Ends frequently, which is what pushed me to seek out more of her writing. Sidewalks is a collection of her essays (heyo, first Bingo square!!), translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Much of Luiselli’s writing feels very nostalgic, almost like she’s […]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Nora Roberts-fied

Year One by Nora Roberts

Of Blood and Bone by Nora Roberts

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CBR11 #2: Year One by Nora Roberts My first Nora Roberts! The two books were a gift from my friend who’s a huge Nora Roberts fan, and she thought Year One could be a good entry point because I’m a real sucker for dystopia fiction. It starts out with a family vacation in Scotland, when a peasant is shot and falls right in the middle of a stone circle, and its blood seeps into the frosted ground. What appears to be a regular hunting expedition turns deadly […]

universal love and pain

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I’m not exactly sure how Rupi Kaur became such a publicly praised and well-known poet, but the first time I read anything of hers was just a snippet on Instagram – which incidentally is what brought on the backlash. How dare this millennial poet use a millennial mode of social interaction to publicize her millennial words? The word instapoets may be descriptive – “young poets publishing verse primarily on social media,” says that Guardian article I linked to – but it also sounds so dismissive, so […]

I really wish they had just *stayed* in Tuscany for the whole month…

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I can’t remember the last time I read a book that is straight-up romance genre, but I’ve been meaning to try more since the CBR community always has such fun reviews of them. So when I saw this Kindle edition book going for $0.99 on Amazon, I imagined re-living Diane Lane’s sojourn in that Tuscan sun movie and bought it. It begins with Lizzy Harper, disgruntled housewife, being told at the last minute by her workaholic husband that he won’t be able to make their […]

More reckless spending on display in the name of excess…

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China Rich Girlfriend is Kevin Kwan’s sequel to Crazy Rich Asians. Even though the first book was imperfect in many ways, I really loved it because it was sort of the first time I’ve seen Asians portrayed in an atypical fashion in English-language fiction. I also recognized a lot of my Singapore family in the first book, so I think that helped as well. That being said, I’m really not as keen about the sequel. Rachel Chu and Nick Young is back, as is Nick’s mother, […]

But God,/doesn’t she wear/the world well?

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This is my first book of poetry, ever. Or rather, pamphlet, because it is so thin. I bought it because of the Beyonce hype behind Warsan’s words, because I’d heard her name over and over, because her name is now tangibly linked to words like “refugee” and “woman”, because a Pajiba friend posted an excerpt from her poem on Facebook, because they actually (actually!) had it in a Bangkok bookstore, a thin sleeve of paperback tucked amidst hundred-page hardcovers. I read it at home, and […]



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