Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“[She] knew that this was her life. Better to be immersed in it than to see it from afar.”

Some Luck by Jane Smiley

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I really enjoy this book and I think this is my second or third time reading it. Some Luck follows the Langdon family, who start off as farmers in Iowa. Each chapter is one year in their lives, and that concept makes this book very readable, as it moves along at a fast pace. This is the first book in a trilogy and covers 1920 to 1953. I think the thing that makes this book more than a gimmick is Jane Smiley’s beautiful prose — there are […]

Taking a Triple Cannonball into the Rising Sea Level!

The Way the World Ends by Jess Walter

Boca Raton by Lauren Groff

Controller by Jesse Kellerman

There's No Place Like Home by Edan Lepucki

Falls the Shadow by Skip Horack

The Hillside by Jane Smiley

At the Bottom of New Lake by Sonya Larson

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Is it hot in here, or is it just these stories? oh, the temperature is definitely rising folks, from GLOBAL WARMING! I struggle with looking climate change in the face; I am concerned, I am trying to do my part, but the onslaught of facts is just too depressing. Climate-change based fiction, though, clicks in a way that I was not expecting. I suppose there is a level of empathy that transcends the “just the facts” nature of the news when the same information is […]

Everything was a mess, especially in the dark.

Barn Blind by Jane Smiley

You Shall Know Them by Vercours

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Two very different two star reviews from my continued QUARANTINE READING! (I am not quarantined, just working from home and/or staying at home like most everybody else).   Barn Blind I started reading this book a few weeks ago my classes’ SSR (Self-Selected reading) periods and it was so dry and bland that I put it aside and read comic books. When I picked it up yesterday, it was equally dry and bland as before. It’s Jane Smiley’s first novel, and what I normally like […]

There were so many things Rosanna could have been besides a farm wife, she thought. But it was not a source of regret—it was a source of pride

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Some Luck – 3/5 Stars This novel begins a trilogy of novels that spends 100 years with a single family, starting with a single farm in rural Iowa and branching wildly into various turns in the 20th century. This novel covers the years from 1920 to 1953 and deals with the purchase of the family farm, the marriage of of the young couple and the birth, childhood, education, and starts in the world of their children. In addition, we get the additional side stories of […]



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