Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Am I Too Dumb for this Book?

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

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Crystalclear listened to the audio version of Mr. Fox and wasn’t sure how she felt about it, but it’s speculative-leaning and maybe reading the actual book would be a different experience, so she suggested it to me. While I do think it was better to read it than to listen to it (Oyeyemi does a lot with fonts, blank space, and paragraph structures that make way more sense looking at it than listening to it), I also am not totally sure how I felt about Mr. […]

slick with sweat, thick with hate-and I love it

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

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Somehow, this incredible little novella flew completely under my radar until last year. Luckily, the folks over at Lit Hub are absolutely obsessed, and I was unable to remain in the dark for much longer. When it’s in a book I don’t think it’ll hurt any more …exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them. While not entirely an “autobiography”, Duras tells the tale of a very young girl who grew up in an unstable household in French-colonized […]

“It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance.”

Mr Salary by Sally Rooney

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Oof. Sally Rooney can do more with 22 pages than others can do with 200. Sukie and Nathan are set to collide. They have been tangled up in each other’s lives since she was an infant and he attended her christening. Sukie’s mother is dead, her father is dying, and she has been living on-and-off with Nathan since she was 19. He’s older, wiser, and much wealthier. She’s been in Boston, and he picks her up from the airport. They are charged from the get […]

This is not a happy story, but hey- neither is The Little Mermaid. 

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

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I devoured Samantha Hunt’s previous novel, Mr. Splitfoot, last year and it easily fell into my top 10 of the decade (If you have yet to come across Mr. Splitfoot then I implore you to check it out; it has everything you’ll ever need: ghosts! cults! comets!) but The Seas easily steals a spot among my favorites of all time. The Seas is slim, spare, and haunting.  I have always been drawn to tales of maritime peril, and while there is no shipwreck here there are […]



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