Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About matt_thac

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White, man, feminist, Muslim, living in a country that's not where he's from, and constantly having to navigate his way in other languages and cultures. Any one and all of these at anytime and less confused that than appears.

matt_thac's Reviews:

Crimes Against Our Own Humanity

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, and Steven R. Scott

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I’ve spent a career at the margins of politics, learning a lot about how people interact and how the most insignificant seeming interaction can have massive ripple effects and how political discourse flows in certain directions, mainly towards fear. It’s a world of real-politik which can best described with the world-weary quote from Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.” Nowhere is this more evident than in George Takei (Yes, Sulu from Star Trek)’s graphic novel rendition of his […]

Apocalypse (S)now – The End of the World at the end of the world

Moon on the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

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There’s a moment in the ’90s movie Independence Day where the Americans lead the charge against the alien invaders by rallying the various nations of the world together. In its rally-raising way, you can almost see the cultural change that came in the following decades. The move away from the centering of Western perspectives to a blend of voices which better represent the world as it is that’s still happening. This book feels like it’s sitting in that ’90s apocalypse window, where the enemy was […]

The Sorry State of the Modern Malaise Novel

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

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The more I read of a particular genre of modern literature, the more it feels the same. The genre is a relative recent one, looking at well-off white people experiencing a midlife change, usually precipitated by crisis. There’s a familiar pattern to the plots which goes beyond typical story beats and almost down to the sentence level. There’s almost a “find & replace” element to them. A few manage to rise above this but most are middling, not bad but not lyrically rich. A Thousand […]

No, but really, everything is connected

Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi

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Conspiracy theories hit differently depending on where you live in the world. The more outlandish ones; the moon landings were faked, we’re all being ruled by lizard people with orange fake tan; live in the West. In most of the Global South, conspiracy theories about government coups aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re just reality seen through a different lens. Ibram X Kendi’s Chain of Ideas feels a little reading about the Lizard People before you realise that, no, this IS how the far-right have come back […]

Everybody’s Talking at Me

Babel by R F Kuang

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  Britain has a problem. It’s struggling to find its place in a shifting world order which is made even more difficult by its inability to have any real societal discussions on its imperial legacy. Our schools and entire educational system were built to churn out good colonial administrators, able to manage an empire but not think about the suffering of the peoples enslaved by it. It also has a rich folkloric history, one of magic and the supernatural. R. F. Kuang’s Babel brings those […]

More (Magical) Real Than The Regime

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar

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  I’ve been thinking a lot about why I appreciate magical realism but fantasy does nothing for me. For me, it reaches truths that fantasy (and other genres) can’t quite grasp. It gives a voice to othered writers, be they minority writers or from the Global South, or more often than not, both. In the hands of a skilled writer, it can express deep emotions like grief, love, and those invisible bonds that link us across generations. It can feel like a folkloric tale, touching […]



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