Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

O’Neill-o-rama

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill

Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O'Neill

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

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Long Day’s Journey into Night  – 5/5 O’Neill wrote this play about 15 years before he died in 1953. It wasn’t published and produced until after he died, and it’s considered by many to be his masterpiece. That rings more or less true mostly because of the close ties to his own experiences, and for me, the way that the play feels more grounded than some of his other plays. He cast several of his plays against a framework of Greek tragedy, which like Greek […]

thrillers are bit of a hit or miss for me, this was sort of…neither?

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

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This is not a case of false advertising–I went into this book fully amped up to read about a female serial killer who makes a career out of offing terrible men whose crimes fall outside the purview of the judicial system. Zero issues there, honestly! But what I couldn’t get into was the tone of the whole thing. It seemed to veer at times: between showing what scary competence can look like, to having Scarlett make some uncharacteristic mistakes, to a historical plot that’s meant […]

read in case of reader emergency!

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

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Another book I really should have read much sooner, recommended by my dear, brilliant bookbird of a feather Evin. At the same time, though, I’m glad that I had this book squirreled away because I’d been through a bit of a rough patch when it came to novels at this point in the summer. I’d just moved to London, and a number of books I’d been looking forward to turned out to be solid 3* novels–which isn’t a bad thing, but if you know how […]

was rooting for a bit of a different ending

Flying Solo by Linda Holmes

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These books really hammer home the difficulties of finding a HEA later in life, don’t they? What do you do when you have a life and like that life? How can someone fit into your life without it becoming a whole thing? The story here, set in the same charming whiter than white town of Somewhere, Maine as Evvie Drake Starts Over (we actually hear about Evvie in a voice over about the local high school baseball coach!) (in the midst of a bit of an argument, […]

sweet and slick, but a bit shallow (like…candy?)

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

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This was an interesting book, perhaps a bit too clever for its own good. Having just finished another book with a very similar framing narrative (Homegoing), I can say it’s not always distracting to do the whole “each subsequent chapter is based on something/someone from the prior chapter” thing. That being said, what you need to retain from chapter to chapter is a sense of emotional resonance to string together what are otherwise rather disparate short stories-ish. This book also, perhaps obviously, made me think […]

A Delicate Balance

A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee

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This is a play by Edward Albee, and boy does it feel like it. Agnes, a woman in her later fifties, opens the play with a discussion of possibly losing her mind. This is taken as sport by her husband Tobias, and her sister Claire who lives in the house with them. One of the prevailing motifs in the play is about alcoholism, but specifically discussions about whether or not someone’s behavior is past the line of alcoholism, or if alcohol abuse might be symptom […]



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