Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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If Neruda could write about an onion, my poems are not that out there….

Ode to an Onion: Pablo Neruda and His Muse by Alexandria Giardino

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While Ode to an Onion: Pablo Neruda and His Muse might not be my favorite book of all time, it is one of the first book in a while that I have truly loved. A book that I felt in my gut. I got engrossed in this book in a way I have not in some time. And it is “only” a picture book and not some “thoughtful novel.” It is a thoughtful picture book. The prose of Alexandria Giardino is a poem as it […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]

I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl…

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Patricia Engel has published two other books, the short story collection Vida and the novel It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris. Even though I haven’t read either of those books, I felt that I needed to read her new novel, The Veins of the Ocean. Not only because the reviews were intriguing (and very positive) but also because I don’t remember ever reading anything by a Colombian American novelist. The Veins of the Ocean is the story of Reina Castillo. When we first meet Reina […]

A telenovela by any other name smells like a telenovela

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At the end of 2016 I realized, to my horror, that I hadn’t read a single book in Spanish, so one of my main reading goals for this year is to read more books in Spanish, preferably by women. And they can’t be translations, that would be cheating, the goal is to read more Hispanophone writers. Enter Contigo en la distancia, by Chilean writer Carla Guelfenbein. This novel won one of the most famous literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Alfaguara. And I […]

Marquez: a good cup of tea, just not my cup of tea

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This is my third adventure with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I read “Love in the the Time of Cholera” and really enjoyed it, but read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and by the end of it felt as if I myself had lived through one hundred years of solitude: it was a chore. Thus, for me, “Of Love and Other Demons” would serve as the tiebreaker. The novel begins with a short introduction by Marquez about his inspiration for this novel, coming across the remains of […]



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