Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Who cared about sex, really? When what you needed was someone to talk to in the dark.” CBR BINGO – Smash (Cannonball!)

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

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“There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It’s like going to meet your new boyfriend’s family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It’s almost easier to believe I’m real than to understand what’s actually going on. […]

*Such* a weird book, but I could not look away from it.

Identitti by Mithu Sanyal

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 4 Book 24/30 A German professor who has been passing as Indian for her entire adult life is found to have been born white, and because she has placed herself in the public eye and has become a pop culture figure/icon, controversy explodes. (The author was inspired by the cases of people like Rachel Dolezal—who gets a couple mentions in the book—to write a story engaging with a fictional and heightened version of that story.) We see through the […]

First Lie Wins: the spy thriller that wasn’t

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

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mood music: Secrets – the weeknd Yet again, I find myself in the minority opinion after my latest “read.” I chose to listen to the audiobook version of this title while nursing a cold, and while the first third of the story was intriguing and well-paced, the latter two-thirds fell apart for me in a way that I had to read a summary to understand what happened at the end. To me, it felt like there were a lot of plot points that were left […]

Anita de Monte Laughs Last: shedding light on a forgotten artist

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

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mood music: Fantasmas – humbe I have complicated feelings about this book, and so I will preface by saying that I am rating it 3.75/5, rounding up on here. The beginning was a little slow, but it picked up for me about a fifth of the way through, and I couldn’t put it down after that. Gonzalez is a talented writer, able to craft fully formed, vibrant characters with narration bouncing off the page. If you like one of her characters, you really like them. […]

An Apprenticeship: I tried

An Apprenticeship by Clarice Lispector

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mood music: Só Tinha De Ser Com Você – elis regina and tom jobim I will accept that I am in the minority regarding this book. Based on the GoodReads score and the consensus on social media, I guess I don’t understand art. Clarice Lispector was a very talented writer, the prose itself is almost poetic in the way that it flows throughout the story, but thematically I could not get on board with this book. At first, I thought it was the translation from […]

You can’t spell “heart” without “art,” man!

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose

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The Museum of Modern Love centers around Marina Abramović’s real-life performance art piece “The Artist is Present” (2009). In 2009, Abramović spent more than 700 hours sitting across a table from strangers, one at a time, at the Museum of Modern Art. She sat for three months and truly looked at each person across from her. And vice versa. For many it was a profound experience. Yet it was a public thing – museum guests could file in and watch these intimate moments. To me, […]



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