Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the Yay for YA Discussion About YA Books Now  

About esmemoria

CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR18 Participant
CBR18 Levels

In my walking around life, I miss my old, blind pug (the Ancient Mariner), help amazing college students become teachers, and tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: esmemoria's Quick Questions interview.)

esmemoria's Reviews:

The Great Work Begins

Angels in America: Perestroika by Tony Kushner

by Leave a Comment

The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time?” In my review of the first play in Tony Kushner’s the Angels in America duology, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, we left the characters after the angel has burst down through Prior’s ceiling and hovers above him proclaiming, “The Messenger has arrived.” We start Angels in America: Perestroika with an old, blind Russian man […]

Threshold of Revelation

Angels in America: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner

by Leave a Comment

I was lucky enough to see Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches on Broadway a long time ago. Reading the script now all these years later, I am surprised to find the written script gave me the shivers just like the live play did. Maybe because I have memories of the experience and have projected them onto the words. But there is no doubt that the play in all its forms is powerful. The subtitle of the play is “A Gay Fantasia on […]

Best Horowitz Yet

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

by 4 Comments

Moonflower Murders is my third Anthony Horowitz mystery and I think it’s the best one thus far. This is a mystery with a full mystery book inside it (and even a short story type mystery embedded in the nestled mystery book!) Susan Ryeland was the editor for late author Alan Conway’s mystery series featuring Atticus Pünd. After Conway’s murder, she relocated to Greece to run a small hotel with her partner. One day a couple comes to see her with a rather preposterous proposal. Their […]

“It bears out a principal axiom of Borges’ philosophy as a writer: that language is by its abstract nature almost laughably reductive of the reality we use it to represent”

Ficciones by Jorge Borges

by 2 Comments

Long ago–25 years I think–a past friend gifted me Jorge Borges’ Ficciones, a collection of short stories by the great Argentinian writer. My friend was a brilliant thinker and writer, and when I glanced at the book after he gave it to me, I thought it was suited to him but not to me. Like my last review of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, I was intimidated and didn’t feel smart enough to understand what probably came easy to my friend. So I put the book aside […]

Nabokov is Funnier than I Gave Him Credit For

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

by Leave a Comment

“I’m not smart enough for Nabokov” I thought to myself as I began his hilarious and sharply observed novel Pale Fire. But then I remembered a saying I recently heard: I don’t have to understand something to appreciate it. And I understood more than I expected to. Like Lolita, Nabokov has written an unreliable narrator, full of himself and driven by unrelenting desire, in this case, the desire to have ownership of his poet neighbor’s final poem. The narrator, Dr. Kinbote, opens the work with […]

“This is how you save the world, Emory. One failure at a time, but always in the right direction”

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

by Leave a Comment

I loved Stuart Turton’s The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (except for one aspect of the ending) so I picked up his The Last Murder at the End of the World. I didn’t like it quite as much as his other book, but it was a solid and diverting read. Slight spoilers ahead. The story takes place on an island that is surrounded by a deadly fog. Almost 100 years before, the human population created this dangerous fog (it’s never said how or why) […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo