Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I’m living Athena’s life. I’m experiencing publishing the way it’s supposed to work.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

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I know what you’re thinking. Thief. Plagiarizer. And perhaps, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist. Hear me out. It’s not so awful as it sounds. Readers, it is exactly as bad as it sounds. Juniper Song Hayward is bad person, but don’t worry, she has forgiven herself. Yellowface is told to the reader by June. We are her confessor. She tells us all of her resentments, fears, manipulations, and triumphs. Most of all, she tells us her rationalizations. Athena Liu and June […]

Go Ask Alice… If You Can Find Her!

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson

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One of the breakout books of the YA genre was Go Ask Alice, the purported diary of a nameless teenage drug addict and runaway. However, the story behind that book and its follow-up, Jay’s Journal, is far more convoluted and amorally exploitative than anyone would expect. I have actually read Go Ask Alice. I was interested in it because of the controversy surrounding its reality, and reading the protagonist’s wild dash through various illicit drugs made it pretty clear that it was indeed not real. The overblown writing […]

Hooray for the Book Exchange, and hooray for narfna!

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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This was a lovely treat from narfna, courtesy of the 2020 Book Exchange. I loved the clever telling of the story-within-a-story, and I almost wanted to know the end of the ‘fictional’ story more than I did the ‘real’ one. Susan Ryeland is an editor. Her company publishes the Atticus Pund series, wildly successful detective books with a Poirot/Gamache-style main character. She introduces herself at the beginning, saying the ninth book in the series would change her life. Then you get to read the manuscript […]

As close as I get to DNF and maybe first 1 star review

Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America's Most Celebrated Publishing House by Boris Kachka

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There’s a few lines on the back cover blurbs that say, “FSG is no ivory tower- the owner’s wife called the office a ‘sexual sewer’- and its untold story is as tumultuous and engrossing as many of the great novels it has published.” This is talking about the American publisher of T.S. Eliot, and other literary greats including Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, Philip Wroth, and Jonathan Franzen. I like books, I like literary history, and I like bibliography, therefore I should have liked this. And […]

Still couldn’t stop the words from pouring out.

The Great Passage by Shion Miura

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The Great Passage is the first that I’ve actually read of the many, many “Kindle First” books that I’ve downloaded for free in the past year or so since I became aware of the Amazon program. I can’t ignore the opportunity for a free book, but I’ve been so on top of my library queue and meeting self-imposed reading deadlines that I just haven’t gotten to any of these, which I mostly choose either based on the description being the least irritating of the group […]

A disappointing history of Nancy Drew, my childhood hero.

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak

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So aside from this gorgeous Scandinavian fairytale book I used to repeatedly check out from the library as a child*, the Nancy Drew books make up the entirety of my first real literary memories. When you have a bookworm for a child, know that that child will scour your entire house for any book it can find**, and will then proceed to read any and all books indiscriminately. This works out well for the child, generally, but you should know it’s going to happen. That’s […]



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