Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“While I was killing him, I had to wipe my mouth with my sleeve every now and then because I couldn’t stop salivating.”

Mars by Asja Bakić

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Anything can become normal, if you continue to stick through it. War, murder, cults, doppelgängers, being deported to Mars- whatever world you are dropped into becomes your world. Asja Bakić is a master of normalcy in abnormal times and places. Her short story collection, Mars, is filled to the gills with the weird becoming common place. I was originally drawn to this collection for less than academic reasons: it is short and it has a pretty corner! I was looking to race through my Bingo card, […]

If you can’t beat em, make em bleed like pigs

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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Bingo category: Book Club (a whole bunch of them) The prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has a young Coriolanus Snow, the future president and villain of the first three books, as its protagonist. I didn’t really want to read it because. . . President Snow sucks. But I requested from my library anyway, just to see what I thought. And here we are. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes place 64 years before The Hunger Games trilogy […]

“Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?”

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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I worked three jobs in the summer of 2005. I frequently worked more than one during any given day. Days off did not exist- except, miraculously, for the 4th of July. The history of the 4th holds no meaning here, just that I finally had a day to myself. I spent my one day off in bed, reading The Handmaid’s Tale from cover to cover. I did not leave the room. I turned down, much to the chagrin of the person whose bed it was, all opportunities […]

A Welcome Addition To YA Dystopias

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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Were we all a little burned out on dystopic YA fiction for a while there? Yeah, and the movie studios sure didn’t help. Yet here in 2020, something about a pandemic has made dystopic fiction that is specifically YA a lot more appealing though, so who better to reignite my interest in the genre than Susanne Collins herself? Did I get so obsessively into the Hunger Games trilogy back in ’12 that I neglected to finish my Masters thesis on time and had to take […]

The Bodies Are Buried

Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh

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I used to see Shovel Ready at bookstores and think to myself “Oh, that seems like an interesting read.” And before I spent money on it, I would eventually remember that I already owned it on Kindle, buying it for a deal back in the days where I used to fastidiously track Kindle deals. Yet for all the time I’ve owned it, I’ve never really been interested in reading it. The premise is one up my alley: hit man operating in a dystopic New York City but I […]



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