Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A monumental achievement that mostly worked like I thought it would

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

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I was shocked to see that this book had only been reviewed one time for Cannonball Read. My cultural frame of reference for this show is that it came out before my time, was one of the biggest shows in the history of television. The show premiered in January of 1977 and Part I garnered a 40.5 share. The show was aired over the course of a single week because CBS was afraid it was going to be a bust, and preferred one bad week […]

In which I finally rectify having never read an American master of writing

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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[TW: violence against children, racial slurs, depictions of slavery, abuse] BINGO – UnCannon In high school I took two AP English classes. In college, I took a Comparative Western Literature course. Toni Morrison was not on any of my reading lists for those courses despite the fact that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and that Beloved was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Perhaps, Morrison is not read more at […]

“This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves.”

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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I am finally getting around to read my second Cannonball Read book exchange gift book this year from Bonnie (thanks Bonnie!) I don’t know what took me so dang long because I loved the first book she gave me, Red White and Royal Blue, and it wasn’t even on my radar to read, and neither was Homegoing and I should have known that Bonnie knows her book business and BOY. DOES. SHE. Homegoing is definitely in my top books of the year, and one I’m […]

I can’t fully get on board the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad won both the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, and part of me is sheepish that I can’t get behind that level of admiration. While the novel is powerful and at times poignant, I had a fundamental issue with its execution. The novel focuses on Cora, a young slave on a Georgia cotton plantation whose mother was infamous for having been the only slave to ever escape that estate. Cora is an outcast even […]

Somehow, both Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton

Henry Clay: America's Greatest Statesman by Harlow Giles Unger

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Were you to ask me, prior to my reading this book, who Henry Clay was, I would’ve been able to tell you that he was an important US politician in the early-19th century who unsuccessfully ran for president a few times. Which, I suppose, is more of a legacy than most people get. Born in 1777 Virginia, and launched a legal career twenty years later in Kentucky. He was such a powerful speaker, and so successful in court, that he was elected to the House […]



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