Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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He kisses . . . like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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The Pulitzer Prize for fiction tends to be more miss than hit for me, especially in the last several years, so when I heard the announcement last spring about Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t know the author by name, hadn’t heard anything about the book, and figured I could safely skip this one. But then I read a brief synopsis: gay novelist in his 40’s, heartbroken and struggling with his work, runs away and something-something-I-don’t-remember because I stopped reading […]

Come for a history of the AK-47, stay for a history of all machine guns

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C.J. Chivers is a former Marine officer and war correspondent.  He won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2017 for his piece about a Marine’s journey home after combat, entitled ‘The Fighter.’  I saw this book a few years ago and wanted to read it but, like most books, it went to the back burner as newer and shiner books popped up.  Then Chivers won the Pulitzer and I put the book on hold at the library. The Gun is, mostly, a history of […]

A worthy literary endeavor that left me underwhelmed

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Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad, was another Mocha Girls Read book club selection. The novel follows Cora on her Odyssey-like journey to escape slavery traveling a magical realistic underground railroad. “Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor – if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.” – page 80 It begins in Africa following the first slaves as they were stolen and brought over to America. From […]

A play about a hard topic to speak about.

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I try to keep track of Pulitzer Prize winners, particularly in fiction and drama, because I like to have my pulse on what is winning awards and what I can teach in future classes. I saw that Lynn Nottage’s Sweat was this year’s drama winner and promptly went to my library. Of course, they don’t have it yet. So I decided the next-best thing would be to read her other Pulitzer Prize winner, Ruined. In short, Ruined is about what happens to women before, during, […]

Story of a Life, kind of

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

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This novel won the Pulitzer in 1995. The author is Canadian. My poetry professor in college recommended me this book 15 years ago. That’s everything I knew about this novel going in. It’s a good novel. It really is. It’s kind of a novel’s novel. What I mean by this is that it focuses on the small events of a family’s lifespan. It involves multiple narrative techniques. It has themes. It has some pictures. It has some humor, some weirdness, and it’s a little over 300 […]

Or Whatever

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I normally paint myself as someone who will trade a decent plot for beautiful prose, but perhaps I have found my limit for that as being somewhere around 300 pages. I don’t think I’m treading new ground to say I thought The Goldfinch would never end. There is such a thing as too much perfection. Tartt has a magic about her writing – without any obvious brush strokes, you are in a scene – you can see and smell and feel everything. She is a […]



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