Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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, […]

Daisy Jones & The Six: DNF at 52%

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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mood music: Fleetwood Mac – the chain This is definitely my biggest reading disappointment so far this year. I realize it’s only February, but still … I fell for the hype from BookTok. This post will be pretty short. My main issue with this book was the structure. Unlike other ensemble novels that I have read, the structure here was like that of an audio transcript, which to give credit, Reid does disclose in the prologue that this is a “collection of interviews” with the […]

Yellowface: what a wild ride

Yellowface by RF Kuang

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mood music: t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l – willow smith This book was a wild ride. I had a very love-hate relationship with it, and it took time to finish because of this. A social commentary about the literary publishing world, it tackles issues with diversity and inclusivity and how minority writers are boxed into specific genres by their publishing companies in service of diversifying the signed authors. The story follows June Haywayd, a young […]

“What sort of man would wish to murder the president of another land? None but a barbarian.”

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

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CBR15 BINGO: Politics, because it addresses U.S. and Belgian involvement in the Congo In 1959, evangelical Baptist preacher Nathan Price takes the word of God to the Belgian Congo, bringing his wife and four daughters with him. Though the mission is supposed to last one year, the family’s stay is extended through the sheer stubbornness and bad judgment of their patriarch and, while the novel spans 30+ years, the majority of it takes place in the few years that Price is actively proselytizing in a […]



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