Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Cannonballing with Emily St. John Mandel.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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Well, really, I should have expected this. I knew this book would be incredibly well-written (it was), and that I often have a bad reaction to lit-fic, but I figured her talent would get me through. And that was true, but this really did not speak to me the way that Station Eleven did. Despite that book being about what happens after the end of the world, that book is full of hope for humanity, and while it has elements of heartbreaking sadness, they’re tempered […]

It’s kind of a lot (but that’s ok)

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

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I liked this, but at the same time, I’m experiencing a potentially problematic personal issue where I’m getting pretty fatigued by multi-POV “but like, how are they all connected, man?” stories. Which is (reductively) David Mitchell’s main wheelhouse. Sorry Dave! The problem is that, inevitably, there are some stories/sections I care about a lot, and others where I don’t quite connect to the character and with their relation to the greater plot. This was definitely the case with Cloud Atlas, the only other Mitchell book […]

CBR11 #5: The Darkness on the Edge of Town

You Might Forget The Sky Was Ever Blue by Michael Chin

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First of all, I have to admit that this review is probably going to be a little biased because the author happens to be a friend of mine. I’ve known Mike for twenty-three years (Jesus, really?) since I was fourteen. We went to nerd camp together — a total of nine weeks over the course of three years. We took writing classes together and wrote letters during the off-season (yes letters! On paper!) A character in his first published work was based on and named […]

He was so unknown, he was still all possibility, unopened cupboards and drawers

The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst

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I had a discussion with Classic a few weeks ago in the comments section of her review for The Paying Guests, which she said started off very slowly. At the time, I happened to be about 100 pages into Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star, and I’d been worrying about how slowly it was moving until I thought back to the same time last year when I read his most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, which didn’t really click for me until the last 50 pages. […]

He kisses . . . like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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The Pulitzer Prize for fiction tends to be more miss than hit for me, especially in the last several years, so when I heard the announcement last spring about Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t know the author by name, hadn’t heard anything about the book, and figured I could safely skip this one. But then I read a brief synopsis: gay novelist in his 40’s, heartbroken and struggling with his work, runs away and something-something-I-don’t-remember because I stopped reading […]

an exercise in lying to liars

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

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What began as a slow and cold (le Carré-esque) waiting game grew into a white hot flash of deceit, anxiety, and dangerous thrills. I cannot claim to know the full horrors and trials of World War II- nor can I draw a true comparison between that dark time and the present, but the world of this book is a different world from our current version. One constant remains: the truth is subjective. In 1940 a young woman is recruited into the fold of MI5. Europe […]



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