Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die.”

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

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After years away from Palestine, actress Sonia returns to visit her sister and takes a role in a West Bank performance of Hamlet, where she must grapple with her delicate relationship with her homeland. I’ve never read a book set in Palestine, which is why I requested this book on NetGalley. This book came out in 2023, but the intervening years have only made it more important to read. Hammad does an excellent job of capturing both Sonia’s alienation from and longing for Palestine and […]

My Year of Dark Academia is Off to an Uneven Start

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

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Lately I’ve been finding myself drawn to dark academia, so I thought this year I might embrace it and go whole hog. I started the year off with two very different dark academia novels–one that I mostly enjoyed, and one that I didn’t really enjoy at all. First up, I read A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid. Effy is an architecture student at a prestigious college, but she wants to be a literature student–only women aren’t allowed to study literature. Her favorite author is Emrys Myrddin, […]

Literature will/might/won’t Save the World. Maybe. I’m not sure the book ever told me.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

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This book takes some really big swings and while it doesn’t miss, it does seemingly bunt the ball. Commenting on the War on Terror & its justifications in the early 2000s – Check. Historical drama featuring Shakespeare – Check. Questioning if Time Travel does actually happen or is just in the mind of the protagonist a la Twelve Monkeys – Check. I could go on. There’s so much happening here that I found myself skimming backwards in the book like it’s a Choose Your Own […]

Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Balls, and it’s a war story

Henry V by William Shakespeare

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Bingo 14: Détente I’ve re-read Henry V the Shakespeare history play because I’m teaching it and haven’t actually re-read it for a good long while. This play both ends and begins with questionable peace between England and France, so it’s suitable for this square. I don’t actually remember my first read, just being really impressed by Kenneth Branagh’s film version, or perhaps more specifically Patrick Doyle’s score. The choral bit after the battle of Agincourt is pretty impressive. One big thing I noticed upon re-reading […]

Mission Be Funny While Stopping Duncan’s Murder

Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Weird Sisters by Olga Wojtas

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Bingo 3: Fanfic Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Weird Sisters is a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; it’s definitely fanfic, both in that it’s a self-insertion into an established world/story and that it’s loaded with basically Easter Eggs that only a fan of the original would appreciate. The premise is that Shona McMonagle is a middle-aged librarian who is somehow capable of time-travel. The time travel thing is not really explained, and it doesn’t really matter as that’s not the point. When Shona was younger, she […]

A great Shakespearean actor

Ira’s Shakespeare Dream by Glenda Armand

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Ira’s Shakespeare Dream by Glenda Armand and illustrated by Floyd Cooper was the right book at the right time. Had I read it any other time than recently in APril 2024, I don’t think it would have hit me the same. I had just read a book that had put all the well-known people in the theme, and I needed something that would give me the unknown. Read via an online reader copy and currently available, Armand takes a probably mostly unknown actor of color […]



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