Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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One of my year’s best already?

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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This historic drama has all the elements I love about a book – great characters and a compelling story that we follow through several generations of the same family, from Korea to Japan and beyond. In the background of Pachinko is Japan’s occupation of Korea and the experience of Koreans in Japan before, during, and after this occupation. We begin in the 1880s in Korea. Hoonie is the son of parents who run a boardinghouse for fisherman. Their lives are meager, but stable. Hoonie eventually […]

A warning on what we could become – Told as a futuristic thriller

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

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GENE EDITING IS A FEDERAL CRIME #GPA ONE MISTAKE CAUSED THE GREAT STARVATION #GPA #NEVERFORGET These are billboards you would pass if you lived in Denver Colorado in the far enough future that gene editing technology is much further advanced, but not so far that hashtags aren’t still a thing. The benefits to this technology include clothes made with spider silk and improvements in medicine and agriculture. But there is also a darker side, where dolls can be wrapped in human muscle and skin and […]

Holden Caulfield is the Worst

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

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This is a book that I feel like I should have read years ago, but somehow I missed that lesson in school. It’s one of those books that is referenced a lot in pop culture so I felt it was time for me to familiarize myself with the source material. It’s funny, after the first page, I thought, “I like this guy! He’s entertaining to listen to.” That lasted maybe…10 pages? If that? I gotta tell you, Holden Caulfield got old REAL fast. I realized […]

A lot to unpack in this short, supernatural mystery

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass

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There is nothing in this book that I relate to. I am not a 16-year old, gay, black, male. And I definitely don’t see ghosts or ghouls. But Jake is and does. And as extraordinary as he is, he still deals with all the other ordinary things a teenager deals with. So Jake’s life is…complicated…to say the least. Jake’s ordinary life concerns living in the shadow of his big brother, growing apart from friends, and getting to know the cute new student at his school […]

50’s Noir Anyone?

Ghost 19 by Simone St. James

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If The Woman in the Window and the Exorcism of Sara May had a baby, it might be something like Ghost 19…something like. I haven’t actually read the Woman in the Window, but I saw the movie with Amy Adams and then I saw the even better The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window with Kristen Bell, so I know what I’m talking about.Hear me out. We have a woman…who is afraid to leave her house…who watches the […]

Not your mama’s Wizard of Oz

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

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“[My mother] told me that, whatever anyone at school said, a trailer was where I lived, not who I was. She told me that it was the best home in the world because it could go anywhere.” And what better place to go than the colorful, magical land of Oz? But we learn quickly that this ain’t your mama’s Oz. Dorothy Must Die is the first of a series of novellas about Amy, from…(I’ll give you one guess). She’s in high school with a mother […]



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