Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Miscellaneous selection of books

Goodbye Vitamin, Krik? Krak!, Home Fire by Rachel Khong, Edwidge Danticat, Kamila Shamsie

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Goodbye, Vitamin – Rachel Khong  https://www.amazon.com/Goodbye-Vitamin-Novel-Rachel-Khong/dp/1250109167/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503250181&sr=8-1&keywords=goodbye+vitamin The story of this novel is a 30 year old woman returns home to care for his father’s debilitation into Alzheimer’s immediately after her engagement falls through. It is written as a series of diary entries and this format often creates a lot of the problems the novel has. For the most part the novel is well-written and interesting, and it’s generally heartfelt, but it’s also pretty flawed in a couple of ways that I think relate to its connection MFA type writing. In terms of plot, there’s almost none. Fine. That’s not always […]

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8/20/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:344 |

I literally just said mysteries are silly

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

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And this mystery is a little silly. It holds up, but it can actually be kind of taxing to read because he prose is so thin and flimsy at times that there’s so little to hold onto. But I was reading this (for the first time, even though I’ve seen the 1974 film and read several of her others) because I was interested in the possibility of teaching this book with a group of special ed 12th graders this year. The class is technically British literature, even though I have been told I don’t have to adhere to that because […]

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8/20/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:341 |

Well I liked this one way better than the first one

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

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I read the first book in this series, Case Histories, about a year or so ago after having already read Life After Life. I thought Case Histories was a little throwaway (or tear-away) but really really really liked Life After Life. I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to read this one except that I found the audiobook and even then I was hesitant and kept putting it off. Turns out I really liked it. A lot of the stuff I didn’t like about the first book was gone…the meandering, the fiction that the actually mysteries were that interesting, and then […]

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8/20/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:340 |

Just another old reread of Faulkner for this Veets

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

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I read this years ago for a Faulkner class and I can clearly remember being “prepped” to read it. The grad students in the class who had read it before basically scared us into thinking it would be a hugely difficult novel, and to some extent it is, but it’s not Finnegan’s Wake and it’s not Absalom Absalom, even. It’s challenging but with the right approach there’s a clear narrative. The structure is four sections; three first person narrations, and a third person narration at the end. The story is the story of a single generation of children of a modestly aristocratic Mississippi […]

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8/17/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:339 |

This is just an entirely brilliant novel

Warlock by Oakley Hall

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This is not a fantasy novel. The title purports to refer to a local silver mine near the town of Warlock (in the Arizona territory) in the 1880s. This is an overtly fictionalized version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral/Wyatt Earp story told through a series of different narrative views, with as much fictionalization as needed for that story, and as much collapsing and challenging the notions of narrative and mythmaking along the way. If we’re being technical it’s not even about Wyatt Earp; it’s Clay Blaisedell. The Citizen’s Council of Warlock has hired Clay Blaisedell, famed gunman and […]

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8/17/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:338 |

Well, this is definitely a 1970s fantasy novel.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin

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This is a strange book to me because on the one hand I know that, while it’s not entirely a new foray into a newish genre, it’s something of an early effort for Ursula K Le Guin, but it’s not a profound extension of the genre, and in fact, it’s even a solidly good novel. It’s good, and it’s fine. But it’s also an oddly out of balance book. It’s short. It feels short when you look at it and hold it, but it also feels and is written like it wants to be long. Here’s what I mean. On […]

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8/17/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:337 |

I really liked it, until I didn’t.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

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So this novel has a lot going for it. I think the initial premise is really good. I think a lot about what would/will happen when there’s a huge environmental or financial crash that topples the total authority of governments to the point that there are corporate enclaves we swear fealty to. I personally will select Amazon because they’re clearly going to be the biggest, have the best supply chains, and I very honestly have thought about what it might mean to live on an Amazon corporate campus and teach employees’ children about the world. Maybe it will never happen, […]

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8/15/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:336 |

A bevy of Education Books 2

Holding on to Good Ideas in a time of Bad Ones by Thomas Newkirk

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Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. https://www.amazon.com/Holding-Good-Ideas-Time-Ones/dp/0325021236/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1502748567&sr=8-3&keywords=thomas+newkirk There’s nothing wrong with this book, in fact there’s a lot right with it. I wanted something different from what I got, hoping for something less (here’s all the things to know, and something more specific). So in a lot of ways, this book is too general for what I wanted from it. It focuses a few key principles for literacy and teaching. I think in general most of what he presents here is (hopefully) gleaned from a few weeks in a classroom: don’t be a snob about […]

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8/14/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:335 |

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