Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter

I want to read more older things and British things this year, and some that are both. Oh and I’ll probably end up reading a bunch of Italian and French writers this year too. I think.

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Olivia understood that actually they would be happier without her

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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CBR11Bingo – Award Winner This is a Booker Prize winning novel from 1975. This novel also became a movie made by Merchant/Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplay, which she continued to do for other Merchant/Ivory movies. She split her career writing films and writing novels. The novel is told through a singular narrator, but two different narratives. There’s a contemporary narrative of the young narrator living in India and having researched her great grandmother, an English woman and wife of an English officer who became a scandal in her youth. In the contemporary narrative, we find our narrator trying […]

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7/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:405 |

I will serve you. Use me in the wide world.

The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

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This books begins in some charming ways, struggles throughout to maintain some of that early sensibility, but ends strongly with a long section that I enjoyed a lot. Bits and pieces of the rest are simultaneously interesting and conflictingly boring. So the book begins with the record and cataloging of the life of Ruth Puttermesser, a lawyer at a good firm who mostly stays out of the way/is unseen. She avers her mother’s advice to simply get married, has a lover she likes, but doesn’t love, and seeks moderate ambition. She’s 34 and thinks her life is more or less […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "I will serve you. Use me in the wide world."

7/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:404 |

You can almost hear it, Rubie’s skeleton rearranging itself

The Beans of Egypt Maine by Carolyn Chute

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I didn’t like this book at all, but I finished it. It had the odd combination of being kind of meaningless, boring, offensive, and charmless, while also being filled to the brim with reviews and authors comments suggesting just how important this work is. It felt like the novelization of the book Hillbilly Elegy, or maybe it’s just the book he copied to write his scam book. This book also felt like a scam. I have read a lot of Southern literature, and while this book takes place in Maine, it’s blue-collar sensibilities is clearly connected to a lot of […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "You can almost hear it, Rubie’s skeleton rearranging itself"

7/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:403 |

“What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.”

Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald

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I sometimes really like Penelope Fitzgerald novels and sometimes don’t. I didn’t particularly like her Booker Prize winning novel, Offshore, in part because it didn’t feel like an award winning novel in the ways that others from the prize absolutely do. I did however, really love her novel The Bookshop, and liked The Golden Child quite a bit. Some parts of this novel I like a lot. We are in Italy and dealing with the Ridolfi family, a historically connected Florentine family who, like a lot of aristocrats after WWII, have fallen on hard times. We are treated to a […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:402 |

Human teeth can’t have done that to her neck.

The Thirst by Jo Nesbo

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CBR11Bingo – Cannonballer Says (https://cannonballread.com/2018/02/jo-nesbo-does-it-again/) I thought I was done with Harry Hole with the last novel because it dived way too deep into misogynistic territories in ways that I didn’t feel like a lot of the previous novels did. I also kind of thought that Jo Nesbo was done writing them, in part because it felt like the previous novel had wrapped things up and had circled back around and was about policework as a whole, not just as a medium. But also because he wrote three more novels in between including creating a new series of novels along […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Human teeth can’t have done that to her neck."

7/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:401 |

The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it.

Some Do Not by Ford Madox Ford

No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford

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Cbr11Bingo – Classics Some Do Not This is the opening novel of the Ford Madox Ford tetralogy, Parade’s End. I imagine he’s as well-known for this novel as his other major work The Good Soldier, but this definitely feels like the culminating work. For one thing, the four novels together are over 800 pages, and while The Good Soldier is a very good novel, this feels like a much more sweeping statement on the world. The lead character is statistician and war officer, Christopher Tietjens, known in the novel as “the last Tory.” The novel jumps around from major scene […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it."

7/12/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:400 |

The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young.

The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett

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CBR 11 Bingo – Listicle I didn’t know much about this book a long time ago, but it had been on my radar for being on the MLA Top 100 of the 20th Century list. What sold me on reading it eventually was Connie Willis using is a forgotten classic in one of the character quirks for the lead in Bellwether, who checks outs library books to save classics from being remaindered. I also almost put it right back after reading the not at all charming introduction that describes a 40 year old Bennett meeting an older woman at a […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young."

7/10/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:398 |

My over-excitement was beyond all description.

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

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Jules Verne occupies a few disparate corners of my imagination, and since I am reading and reviewing two of this novels here, I will share them. First, I read pretty much every edition of “Great Illustrated Classics” that I could as a kid. I would like to go on some kind of fake affected rant about how they opened up doors to me, but really I used them for Book It and Accelerated Reader to earn points with my friends. I think ultimately they proved to be inadequate replacements for the real things (for the 2-3 dozen of the books […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "My over-excitement was beyond all description."

7/10/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:397 |


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