Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Rooooomie

CBR13 participant

Trying to rid myself of the terrible habit of reading more about books than reading actual books.

Rooooomie's Reviews:

The ones without names

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

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When I was a kid, I was deep into Greek and Roman mythology. That interest stayed with me during Greek and Latin classes in high school, but once I was lured into the traps of modern literary fiction, I never really looked back. Recently, a slew of retellings of famous mythological stories started coming out, including some that tell these stories from new points of view. (I will read you eventually, Circe.) I’m not sure why I decided to pick up The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, […]

What women do and always have done

The Hare by Melanie Finn

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I’m not the type of person who can only read books with likeable characters, but I do have my limits – which were tested in the first quarter of The Hare. Rosie is an art student, raised by her grandmother in an environment that didn’t exactly curst with love and money, who meets an older man, Bennett, and quickly falls in love with him. Bennett is written as such an obviously shady guy, with very few redeeming qualities, that it’s hard to understand why Rosie […]

The sinister side of suburbia

The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

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I know it’s not very original, but I’ve long had an interest in suburbia. Watching movies like Edward Scissorhands and reading books like The Stepford Wives only fuelled that; I love the idea of the secrets that lie below the surface of a seemingly perfect life. Shirley Jackson clearly shared that interest, and managed to turn it into a fantastic, suspenseful novel. Jackson is most well known for books like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but while I like those, […]

Sitting crooked and talking straight

Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murdered by Karen Kilgariff & Georgia Hardstark

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I started listening to the My Favorite Murder podcast a few months after it first started, but didn’t really get into it until about a year ago, when I started binge-listening to it, feverishly trying to catch up with current episodes. I have always been fascinated by true crime, and I love a podcast with good banter, so MFM scratches a good itch for me. The book is a collection of personal stories and anecdotes — I wouldn’t call them essays — from the two […]

The stories we tell ourselves

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

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Conversations with Friends has earned the (dubious) honor of receiving my first 5-star review of the year. For the first 3-4 chapters in the book, I didn’t think it would, but it ended up being a compulsive read that kept popping up in my mind when I was doing other things. Conversations is a tight story about a young student, Frances, and her best friend (and ex-girlfriend) Bobbi, who meet and befriend Melissa, a journalist married to a handsome actor, Nick. As Frances is drawn into Melissa […]

When favorite authors disappoint you, pt 2: disappoint harder

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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In my second review for CBR13, I wrote about how disappointing it is when one of your favorite authors writes a book that you just do not like. I don’t know if this is some kind of cannonball curse, but with book 6 of this challenge, it has happened to me again. I used to be a huge YA fan, and the first book in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy still ranks as one of my favorites. His short novel A Monster Calls is amazing too […]



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