Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time
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About tiny_bookbot

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

How do we write good stories about storytelling

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

June 5, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 1 Comment

By happenstance, I wound up reading Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Erin Morgenstern’s follow-up to The Night Circus, The Starless Sea, within just weeks of one another. Digital library loan hold lists just shake out like that sometimes. And I was struck by how both were, at their heart, doing much the same thing, which is to say, telling stories about the power of telling stories, and doing so through an apparatus of doors that lead into other worlds/stories, and how the encounters with the […]

Filed Under: Fantasy, Fiction Tagged With: #fantasy, alix e harrow, Erin Morgenstern, metafiction, Queer characters, storytelling

tiny_bookbot's CBR12 Review No:10 · Genres: Fantasy, Fiction · Tags: #fantasy, alix e harrow, Erin Morgenstern, metafiction, Queer characters, storytelling ·
· 1 Comment

The “obstinate love” of memory

The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

June 2, 2020 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

The first few days of April, I was supposed to be in Houston for the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies.  This community of academics is one of my favorites, and this conference is something I’ve come to look forward to, not least because there are pretty much always four poetry roundtables, conference sessions in which a small panel takes the whole audience through a discussion of a recent book of Irish poetry. Handouts of select poems are provided for everyone, and […]

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

tiny_bookbot's CBR12 Review No:8 · Genres: Poetry · Tags: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin ·
· 0 Comments

A kinder book for a harder time

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

May 30, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 1 Comment

If I had known quarantine was coming, I would have made some different choices. For one, I would not have ordered Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light as my spring break read, since my focus would be far too fractured to get myself back into that Thomas Cromwell and the Tudors mindset. For another, I would not have assigned Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio to my intro students as our major readings for the back half of the semester. I went into lockdown and immediately recorded ten lectures […]

Filed Under: Fiction, Mystery Tagged With: Jacqueline Winspear

tiny_bookbot's CBR12 Review No:7 · Genres: Fiction, Mystery · Tags: Jacqueline Winspear ·
Rating:
· 1 Comment

“Guys, Auden is my man”: it’s hard not to love W. H. Auden

Selected Poems by W. H. Auden

February 24, 2020 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

I’m teaching a course on twentieth century British poetry, and we’re whipping through six poets in about fifteen weeks. My students appreciated T. S. Eliot, and enjoyed Robert Graves, but we are halfway through W. H. Auden, and he has enthralled them, hitting them square in their hearts with brutally accurate yearning and empathy. We’ve taken a thematic approach in working through the Selected Poems: quotidian life, war & politics, and most recently: the love poems. (We’ll hit the transcendence of art & religion, and then touch […]

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: W. H. Auden

tiny_bookbot's CBR12 Review No:6 · Genres: Poetry · Tags: W. H. Auden ·
Rating:
· 0 Comments

Ciaran Carson’s Last Words: Love, all love

Still Life by Ciaran Carson

February 18, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 1 Comment

I love Ciaran Carson’s work. I have loved it since my junior year of undergrad, when I was studying abroad in Scotland and took a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature. We read The Ballad of the HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems, and something in Carson’s depictions of his beloved, troubled city hooked itself deep inside me. I have never forgotten the closing lines of his poem “Smithfield Market”: Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. But as the charred […]

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Ciaran Carson

tiny_bookbot's CBR12 Review No:5 · Genres: Poetry · Tags: Ciaran Carson ·
Rating:
· 1 Comment

Signs, and A Severe Mercy, must be read with caution

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

February 11, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 7 Comments

How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours? To be honest, Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy was a book I had avoided for a long time. There’s a few reasons, though first and foremost is the C. S. Lewis connection: almost ever edition of the […]

Filed Under: Biography/Memoir, Non-Fiction Tagged With: Sheldon Vanauken

tiny_bookbot's CBR12 Review No:4 · Genres: Biography/Memoir, Non-Fiction · Tags: Sheldon Vanauken ·
Rating:
· 7 Comments
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