Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

I was promised a coven and all I got was a middle aged woman filled with internalized misogyny

Go Gentle by Maria Semple

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Bingo Square: Wealth (there’s a bunch of super rich characters whose wealth and privilege is never truly reckoned with) And the streak continues … I swear, I like reading and books but it is easier to articulate my thoughts on the ones that are flawed, and I do feel like I have been reading a larger than usual amount of books that aren’t working for me. Am I getting worse at picking books (this one was a book club choice, though), am I extra critical […]

On Proust, memory, and relationships

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

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CBR18 BINGO: Left, because this is Julian Barnes’s last novel; ergo, there’s nothing left I’ve always had a difficult relationship with Julian Barnes. Sometimes I read a line and think, “What a genius. No wonder he won the Booker Prize.” Then I read a bit more, and I just feel tired. Departure(s), which Barnes has said is going to be his last book, is a blended novel, comprising elements of memoir, essay, and fiction. This format is what prompted me to realize that, as a […]

Pow, Right in the Feels

Heart the Lover by Lily King

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Heart the Lover is a new(ish) book from Lily King, published in October of last year. The narrator is a writer, nicknamed “Jordan,” after Gatsby’s Jordan, by two of her classmates. The book follows her relationship with the young men from college through their late-40s. It’s not a long book, only 249 pages, but it definitely packs a punch. I’m a big fan of author Lily King. I think she’s a phenomenal writer and I’ve loved everything I’ve read of hers. That being said, I […]

This book also has a character called “the cutie bandit,” which is amazing.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

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When I tell you I was not interested in this book at all and then I zoomed through it in a day and a half. It was a book club pick, and I’d read and liked/loved I think three of her books before this one, but the synopsis just didn’t call to me. But, book club pick, so I reserved it from the library. This book is the epitome of what I mean when I say that writing style is the most important thing in […]

“We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die.”

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

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After years away from Palestine, actress Sonia returns to visit her sister and takes a role in a West Bank performance of Hamlet, where she must grapple with her delicate relationship with her homeland. I’ve never read a book set in Palestine, which is why I requested this book on NetGalley. This book came out in 2023, but the intervening years have only made it more important to read. Hammad does an excellent job of capturing both Sonia’s alienation from and longing for Palestine and […]

Navel Gazers United

Justine by Lawrence Durrell

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Justine follows the various intermingled lives and love affairs of a group of artistic people in Alexandria, where it sometimes seems the city is playing itself out in their daily struggles. This is a bit of a difficult book to write a review of, because frankly not much happens. The narrator is in a relationship with one woman but becomes bound in a passionate affair with another, complicated by the fact that he is friends with her husband, and the fact that this woman Justine […]



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