Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Do You Have the Need? The Need to Read?

The Need by Helen Phillips

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Helen Phillips knows how to grab your attention. My pulse was already quickening on the very first page. I had to read as much of it as quickly as I could; the chapters are snappy and taught. I had to stop myself from skimming to the bottom of every page. I was desperate for relief; chapters whip back and forth between the present and several hours ago and I just had to know what nasty break was waiting for me in the present. My distress […]

“The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)”

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

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Ooof. This book is slight, but it packs a wallop. I felt like I was reading through someone’s diary. It was as if the diary was left open with a READ ME sign glowing in neon above, but it was still so personal that I had to keep sneaking furtive glances over my shoulder to make sure that the diary’s owner wouldn’t walk in to find me poring over her every thought and feeling. When our narrator “I secretly hope that I might be a […]

Celeste Ng, I Stand Corrected

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Confession time: when the lovely Borisanne gifted me with this book in this year’s CBR Book Exchange, I was disappointed. In her defense, it was definitely in my “to read” pile on Goodreads; however, in my defense I forgot it was there. Last year I read Celeste Ng’s “Everything I Never Told You” and I did NOT care for it. I gave it a two. So, I went into reading “Little Fires Everywhere” ready to dislike it but was stunned to discover I really REALLY […]

Were I to Pull Every Line that Made Me Gasp I Would be Quoting the Book in its Entirety

The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

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I’d lick my lips, slowly, letting my pink tongue dangle out of my black mouth a little just like some animal waiting by the side of the road for the driver who killed it to come back one more time and kill it again This collection is stitched together with muscle, sinew, and blood. Samantha Hunt writes in a way that tears apart beautiful language and forces you to read the story through twisted entrails like a time-forgotten seer. The tales are modern in theme […]

Nonetheless, I still want to be a lighthouse keeper

The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

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I read Ahab’s Wife at an impressionable age and it filled me with a deep hatred of whales (unfair to them, I know) and a fierce desire to be a lighthouse keeper. Despite many things keeping me from a serious pursuit of such an endeavor (I keep moving further and further away from the ocean, the aforementioned hatred of whales, my reliance on the internet…) I will always jump at the chance to read something lighthouse adjacent. The Light Between Oceans starts off strong- a quiet and […]

Dear Diary; nature has gone haywire

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

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A young Native American woman learns that she is pregnant in a time of miracles and disaster; nature has gone haywire. Evolution has sped up, gone sideways, and/or stopped all together. Times are trying. It is a particularly frightening time to be a single person with an unplanned pregnancy- especially when religious-esque government agents are collecting and imprisoning pregnant women. Our narrator, Cedar, gives us her story through the pages of her diary. She is keeping accounts of her body and the world around her […]



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