Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Half Read but Still Reviewable

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Just for clarity and full disclosure, I only managed to get through about the first 100 pages of what is 563 page novel before I got distracted and then had to return it to the library. But I still got enough to form some impressions, even if I’m honest, I may not have truly been able to really read the whole thing even if there hadn’t been another hold on the book and I’d have kept it a while longer. The Ministry for the Future […]

Long, yes; lovely, yes

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

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I’m staring at a 771-page novel, replete with sticky notes I’ve placed to mark passages of interest, and I don’t know where to begin. The Goldfinch is an epic tale encompassing themes of loss, fate, friendship, family, love, accountability, and the nature of art. This is a novel for which future teachers of American literature will assign very specific essay topics to their students, such as “Describe Andy’s relationship with water and how it correlates to his relationship with his family,” or “What makes art […]

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

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Goodreads tells me I’ve read this three times, although it feels like more, since I’ve also taught it twice. It’s a terrifying book in the sense that it COULD happen very easily, and even more terrifying when you realize that what white women are being put through in the novel is something that ALREADY happened around the world to other women, in some form or another. I won’t bother to recap the story, because it’s been read and re-read before, plus the Hulu series illuminates […]

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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We all lost our collective minds over Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, which was a century-spanning epic about race and family, so the pressure was on for her sophomore effort. I think she’s made the smart choice to try for something completely different. Where Homegoing had buckets of characters, narrated in the third person, and a new setting and time period every fifty or so pages, Transcendent Kingdom is a smaller, more intimate portrait of one woman thinking about her life, and thinking about her […]

Not as good as her last one

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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Official book description: Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent’s half-brother, Paul, scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune Logistics, sees the note from […]



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