Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Heartbreaking work on staggering loss

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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Joan Didion passed away in late December, 2021, which made the beginning of 2022 feel like the right time to read arguably her most famous book, The Year of Magical Thinking. The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir on grief. On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, John Dunne, returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana, in the hospital, where she was suffering from severe pneumonia. They fell into their usual evening pattern- starting the fire, making dinner- when John had a heart […]

The Three S-s: spooky, sad, and a little bit sexy

The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel

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Honestly, what else could you need? If you are our Heroine Leigh Wells, you need quite a bit. You’ve been called back to your ancestral island home, far flung from the wild shores of Scotland. World War Two did not hit your home directly, but it stole many young men and sent very few back home. The few that returned are not who they once were. The island is not what it once was. The Sluagh (sloo-ah) still return every October, but every year they […]

I Wish I Could Read Japanese

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

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One of my friends brought Kitchen back from her study-abroad to Japan in the mid 00s. I was woefully non-diverse in my reading at the time, so my first read of this book in 2008 was mostly vague and unaware. It left no impression. I didn’t even remember I owned it until re-shelving a bunch of books from packing boxes this spring. An MFA and six years of CBR diverse reading under my belt later, this read was a vastly different experience, the most striking of […]

Good Writin’, Bad Thrillin’

Every Last Lie by Mary Kubica

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Clara Solberg’s infant son is only four days old when the police come to her door to tell her that her husband Nick and her daughter Maisie have in a serious car accident. Maisie is unharmed but Nick soon dies, leaving Clara alone with two young children and no income. To make matters worse, Maisie keeps having nightmares about being chased off the road by a ‘bad man’. Clara initially chalks it up to trauma and Maisie being a four year old, but soon other […]

Year of Penny? EXCUSE ME, LIFE of Penny!

The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson

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5/26 UPDATE: if you are curious and want to check out an excerpt, you can do so HERE! Do you miss Happy Endings? If you have seen the show, then the answer is obviously YES SO MUCH OH MY GOODNESS PLEASE COME BACK! If you have not seen the show, then what are you doing? Get out of here and inject all three seasons directly into your eyeballs before returning! Several days ago, the unfortunately canceled Happy Endings turned 10. 10! It seems like just yesterday, Alex […]

When Langston Found Langston

Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome

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Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome is an interesting look at the late 1940s, Chicago, growing up and literature that was way too short. I would have enjoyed more of the history of the time and seen a bigger connection to the two people called Langston. Still, I enjoyed what I read but, like I said, there needed to be more: more of the history of the times (Why were the black families moving north? Why were the soldiers were coming back? Even the fact that […]



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