Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“It’s true on a technicality. I’m being held unlawfully. I didn’t commit the crime for which I’ve been convicted. But if you look at it another way, I deserve to be here. I did a lot of other shitty things, for which I wasn’t punished.”

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

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I wish I would have known this was a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov before I purchased this book and got all excited about it. I probably never would have picked it up. There is a reason that I have never read any of Dostoyevsky’s stuff (or Tolstoy for that matter). The Family Chao follows the titular family, owners of a Chinese restaurant in a small town in America. The parents of the family are immigrants from China, and there are three sons. When the […]

An extremely unexpected new favorite.

Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

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This book spoke to me. Katrina Kim is the most lovable, vulnerable mess of a human. I would find it concerning how much I identified with her* if I wasn’t too busy enjoying every bonkers moment of this book. I was worried as I approached the end, given how I’d lost my mind over it so far, that the ending wouldn’t do Katrina justice, but I shouldn’t have been worried. I cried happy tears and felt much resolution. *I have OCD and she does too, […]

CBR15 Passport! Book #1 – A book that is Not For Moi.

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

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Oof, this was not for me. Like, so not for me that I maybe shouldn’t even be writing a review, because my brain just bounced off this after about ten pages and then just kept bouncing harder and harder. This is a speculative fiction, experimental novel by British poet Salena Godden about an anthropomorphized version of Death (here called Mrs. Death, personified by an older Black woman) and her connections to/conversations with a person called Wolf. In addition to the the prose actually feeling like […]

“For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.”

Matrix by Lauren Groff

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I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise. Here, it’s nuns. I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to […]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]

“Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

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Look at me, reviewing a book I just finished yesterday*. I am determined to review all my October books in a timely fashion** so as not to make my backlog problem worse than it already is. (Sigh.) This was sort of a bummer one to start my October spooky reads on because it was all serious and stuff, no fun at all to be had here. But I can’t deny it was very well done. *But posted here in December, whoops. I finished this in […]



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