Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest.

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“I think I saw our ghosts”: a devastating modern WWI novel

Regeneration by Pat Barker

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Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was one of my favorite novels of 2018; I read it after teaching The Iliad for the first time, fascinated by the idea of a novel that told the events of the epic primarily from a feminine point of view: namely, that of Briseis, the Trojan captive that Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over. It was also my first introduction to Pat Barker in general, and was I ever appreciative of that when I learned that Barker had also written a […]

More Gossip Girl than Grimm’s

Of Curses and Kisses by Sandhya Menon

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I had not read Sandhya Menon’s breakout hit When Dimple Met Rishi, but I’m a sucker for a fairytale retelling, so when this book appeared in my Libby app, I went ahead and decided to try it out. I’m always looking for something enjoyable to listen to when walking the dog, and this seemed like it’d do the trick. The setup is simple: it’s a retelling of Beauty & the Beast which shades of Romeo & Juliet. The Emerson and Rao families have been at odds […]

“She had lifted me to her star…”

Olivia by Dorothy Strachey

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Welcome to a small world in which “a world in which everything was fierce and piercing, everything charged with strange emotions, clothed with extraordinary mysteries, and in which I myself seemed to exist only as an inner core of palpitating fire.” Isn’t that a place you want to go? I happened across this slim novella by chance in the classics section of a nearby indie bookstore. The author’s surname caught my eye, and I did a quick search to see if she was related to […]

“Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest”

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

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I’m really interested in the Bloomsbury Group (that intellectual crowd from the 1910s-1920s that included E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf), and so of course I’d come across multiple references to Lytton Strachey and his book Eminent Victorians, which so many literary scholars say was foundational to changing how people wrote biographies, and yet which I almost never see quoted or discussed at any kind of length at this point. Since I’m thinking of teaching on the Bloomsbury Group sometime soon, I decided I should investigate the […]

Saying goodbye to a favorite poet

The Historians by Eavan Boland

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I first encountered Eavan Boland’s poetry during my junior year study-abroad in Scotland. I did a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature that was, quite frankly, pretty damn formative, and when we got to Eavan Boland, I was hooked. She wrote with such candor about the experience of being a woman, and a woman poet, and about being an Irish woman poet, and the struggles of finding her place in a tradition where women were almost always the subjects of poems, not the creators. […]



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