Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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God help this woman, I sure can’t!

Negative Space by Gillian Linden

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“No one is suggesting anyone should react to anything in any particular way.” I think that is the guiding principle of many people who, whether they realize it or not, end up showing tolerance and ambivalence at the same time. And it sums up how I felt about this book. When I first started listening to this book, I thought the narrator was a teenager. She is timid, insecure, anxious, questioning of every little thing around her. I soon realized she is a teacher at […]

An archaeologist, an amusement park employee, a talking pig. Everyone is doing their best.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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In 2020, when many of us began working from home, I started listening to a podcast series called The Happiness Lab. The creators had produced a string of episodes dedicated to coping with the pandemic, and one episode in particular stuck with me. The theme was that, at some point, we would come out on the other side of our current global challenge, and one way to get through it was to think about what kind of story we want to be able to tell […]

The stories of two young men

Hands by Torrey Maldonado

Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes

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I needed a short read or two. I found two, while terribly short looking, books that also felt like they would have some “meat” to them. And those books were Hands by Torrey Maldonado and Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes. I was familiar with Grimes, as they are the author of Garvey’s Choice and others I enjoyed reading. But Maldonado was new. Hands looked like it would be a boxing book. And it is, somewhat. But really what the book is about are […]

Je me souviens

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

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A synopsis of the book on its cover reads: “three strangers are thrown together in one Manhattan apartment: a solitary writer; a Gen Z college drop-out; and a spirited parrot named Eureka.” Yes and no – yes, some may argue that it is the central story but for me that is generalizing just one aspect of the book. The Vulnerables is more about the musings and observations of the central character (the writer) from her point of view all centered around the onset of the […]

Another Airport Transit Read

Sleep Donation: A Novella by Karen Russell

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This is another book gifted to me by andtheIToldYouSos last year. And this also turned out to be a great little novella to slip into my handbag for those times I was transiting through airports—this time to Indianapolis. Sleep deprivation is a brutal thing; unfortunately in the last few months, I’ve experienced a good deal of that. However, in Sleep Donation,  loss of sleep has become the new pandemic. In its most extreme form, it kills. However, there is a therapy that has been developed […]

Medieval Armageddon

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

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This was…not the book I was expecting. I figured it would just be three people questing their way through medieval horror episodes. And it is that. The thing is: the horror is taking place during the bubonic plague, which has also apparently opened a portal to hell freeing the demons to do cosmic battle with the angels…hence the horrors on earth. Yeah this book is a lot. And it’s really good. The three main characters are cyphers for the larger story Christopher Buehlman is trying […]



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