Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Steampunk, historical fiction, mystery?

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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I love steampunk and this cover is as steampunk at they get (plus the hardcover one actually has a cutout on the cover that reveals the watch on the inside page which is a really cool design).  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is a delightful read that defies genres.  The book takes place in Victorian London when the Irish Nationalist movement is terrorizing the city.   Bombings at Scotland yard and Victoria station are being investigated.  Could anybody but a master clockworker have […]

Many Americans right now are acting like Jeevan in the snowstorm. Life is imitating art.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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I didn’t really know what to expect going into this.  I knew that Cannonball peeps (and other people I know) had raved about it, so I assumed it was going to be good.  And it still wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. (I need to stop going into things with expectations.)    Station Eleven has a linear story that’s been cut up and rearranged with one character being the lynchpin that holds it all together.  We start with a Toronto production of […]

Book Club Discussion Post: Station Eleven Revisited

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Welcome to our first #CannonBookClub of 2020 – a return trip to Station Eleven. When MsWas and I discussed revisiting our first book club book six months ago we couldn’t have known what the state of the world would be when we got to March. COVID-19 is very different than the Georgian Flu, but it certainly gave us a new lens through which to view Emily St. John Mandel’s book. On to the boilerplate: ground rules remain the same as they always have. For those […]

Maybe a Perfect Book?

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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This is my third reading of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. It is one of my favorite books of the past few years, a book that I find to be nearly perfect. This reread was for Book Club. It is also an extremely prescient time to be reading a book about a global pandemic, but I’m glad that Covid-19 isn’t nearly as devastating as the Georgian Flu. What I was struck with this time through was how Mandel structured the pass-offs between characters. On […]

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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I thought I remembered much more of Station Eleven than I did; I had remembered it as a story of Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony and several scrapes with some religious extremists. I remembered Jeevan in the fortress of his brother’s tower. I remembered skulking through rotting schools and all-encompassing trees. What strikes me now is how immediately the sense of dread starts to kick in; there is no slow build; a statement about everything falling to pieces kicks in within the first chapter. Maybe […]



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