Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Some places, you never leave the same

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

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Kicking off my CBR12 Bingo with The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead for the RED book cover square. A beautifully written novel about a segregated Florida reform school during the Jim Crow era. All the boys never left The Nickel Academy the same as when they arrived. The novel flashes between the present and the past through Elwood’s eyes. Each chapter gives you a lyrical moment in time. We learn about the place in pieces, flashing forward to Elwood as an adult. As soon as […]

cbr12bingo – Adaptation!

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

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It is 1954, and a young man named Atticus is headed home to Chicago. In Chicago he will find his beloved uncle and aunt, who together run The Safe Negro Travel Guide and Travel Agency. His uncle, like himself, is a lover of pulp novels and dime store comics. His aunt travels the country alone, adding stops to the travel guide while looking at the stars. He’ll find his little cousin, a comic-book hound and talented artist. He’ll find his old friend Titia, who has […]

“The tricky thing about giving opinions is that sometimes they cost you more than you wanted to spend.”

The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee

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Jo Kuan and her father figure Old Jin have gotten by pretty well, considering they are Chinese Americans in the deep South of 1890.  Old Jin works as a horse caretaker for a local wealthy family, and Jo has a talent for millinery, so she is hopeful for an apprenticeship at the shop she works.  However, she is abruptly fired one day due to her supposed overly-frank attitude with customers (“You make the customers uncomfortable”).  Old Jin is able to get her a position as […]

Horror Against a Jim Crow Backdrop

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

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I think I’ve read maybe one Lovecraft short story and didn’t particularly enjoy it but I found the concept behind this novel rather intriguing, and decided to pick it up. Of course, I then waited for over a year to read it … what can I say, as creative as I thought the approach would be, I wasn’t sure if I had enough context to enjoy it. The novel begins in the 1950s, as Atticus Turner returns home to Chicago after a stint in the […]

A Short History of White Women’s Complicity

Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

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In Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae makes a strong argument for white women’s vital role in protecting and perpetuating white supremacy and thwarting integration in the US. One hundred years ago, woman began to organize in ways that we would recognize from today’s resistance movements. They developed grassroots campaigns reaching out to other women and encouraging them to organize, to write letters, to publish, to speak up and to vote. They did this, however, […]

Two books so close as to be indistinguishable

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander

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You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]



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