Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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can a fiction book about the historical racial terrorism be funny actually yes

The Trees by Percival Everett

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CW: lots of gore and descriptions of historical lynchings Percival Everett is another one of those incredibly prolific authors, and I’m frankly a bit embarrassed by how few of his works I’ve read. Given that this is the second one that I’ve enjoyed, I think I’ll turn to his back catalogue whenever I’ve got a bit of a gap to fill. I was under the impression that this book was about murderous trees, specifically that the trees used to lynch Black people (the book focuses […]

“Who’s on First,” but Make it Percival Everett

Dr. No by Percival Everett

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You may not have known you needed a Percival Everett take on a Bond villain, but you definitely do. Our main character, Wala Kitu (words that mean “nothing” in Tagalog and Swahili) is a brilliant mathematician who studies nothing. As in nothingness, which is not the same as the nothing that is the absence of something. He was sought out by villain John Sill to provide guidance as Sill seeks to steal nothing from the government. Nothing becomes part of a constant play on words, […]

A Range of Books From Brutal to Cozy

An Ember in The Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

James by Percival Everett

The Tea Dragon Society by K. O'Neill

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An Ember in the Ashes Sabaa Tahir swiftly establishes the brutality of the world the characters are living in, in this first of a 4-book YA fantasy series. The Martials conquered Scholar lands 500 years ago and the Scholars are second-class citizens who are frequently enslaved. Elite Martial soldiers known as Masks are also treated violently as they go through their training at Blackcliff. The book alternates POVs between Laia, a Scholar, and Elias, a Mask who has nearly completed his training. They come into […]

Believe the hype

James: A Novel by Percival Everett

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Cbr17bingo TBR (2 bingos) James won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. For some people, “literary fiction,” especially the prize-winning kind, can be intimidating and/or off-putting, but this novel is engaging, exciting and horrifying from page one. James is Percival Everett’s imaging of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his adventure down the Mississippi River, gets separated from him, and is reunited with him again near the end. Everett imagines […]

A More Complete Version of Huck Finn

James by Percival Everett

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CBR17Bingo – “Black” for the mostly black cover James (2024) by Percival Everett has been everywhere. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and I’d seen reviews and mentions of it all over the place. Barack Obama recommended it as well. So, it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading it. As most people know by now, James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the point of view of Jim. I’m pretty sure I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn many, many […]

“Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.”

James by Percival Everett

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I heard from multiple people that James was THE BOOK to read last year, and it was on a lot of best of lists, so I was exicted to give it a read. It fully hooked me from the first sentence “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” I didn’t have a lot of expectations about this book, but having me chuckle from the start was a surprise. This is a retelling of the classic tale Huck Finn but from the […]



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