Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

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I was given this book as a birthday present about six years ago by my friend Lindsay and it has been languishing on my shelves ever since. Enter 2020, the Read Harder Challenge, and whatever the fuck else has been going on this year that means I’m reading more from my own shelves than anywhere else. And I’m glad I finally got around to it! This is an over 600 page literary fiction book, but it reads in the way I like my literary fiction […]

“How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?”

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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This is one of those books I don’t really feel like I can review without writing something the length of a dissertation. The Vanishing Half follows the divergent paths of identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes, from their childhoods in the 1950s through the early 1990s. The twins grow up in a small town called Mallard that is entirely populated by mixed race Black folks. The founder of the town wanted a place that people who didn’t fit in with either the white or […]

One of the few times I will say to watch the movie first.

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

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I probably chose the wrong time to read this one, as so many of my friends like it quite a bit, even ones who don’t like Thomas Hardy as a writer. But it nicely filled a challenge for Read Harder, and because it’s been on my TBR for over a decade, and it was available on SCRIBD, I did it. And I didn’t not like it, I just found it hard to finish, and it never really caught my attention. I missed soooo much while […]

“Maybe it wasn’t about the moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.”

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

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This felt like two separate books to me, and one of them I liked much better than the other. The two central characters in this novel are Deming Guo and his mother, Polly, who is a Chinese immigrant (undocumented) from the city of Fuzhou, now living in New York (I loved the specificity of Deming and Polly insisting they speak Fuzhounese, which is a dialect of Min Chinese; this book had great cultural and historical detail like this all throughout). The first third of the […]

“They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra, in which all there was to do was cry and wail.”

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma

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CBR12 BINGO: UnCannon BINGO: UnCannon, Nostalgia, Yellow, Happy, Repeat The description for the “UnCannon” category in CBR12 Bingo advises the reader to “Challenge yourself as much as you are able.” So while I could have picked up any book by a female author (of which there are many on my TBR list) to satisfy this category, I chose to read something by 34-year-old Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma. My husband read An Orchestra of Minorities last year and raved about it, so I decided now would […]

Opportunity walks into a bar

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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I so loved Station Eleven when I read it earlier this year that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel. I wasn’t disappointed; yet, The Glass Hotel is so like and at the same time so unlike Mandel’s previous novel that I’m not sure where to begin. While I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Station Eleven, I’m giving it 5 stars because (once again) the writing is so damn beautiful that it transports me. […]



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