Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Always this empty heart, always

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

by Leave a Comment

Dave Win is a thirteen year old school boy at the start of this novel. It’s 1960s England, and Dave – the bastard son of an Englishwoman and a Burmese man, long lost to the turmoils of his home country – grows up as the perpetual outsider. Dave is clever; he has won a scholarship to an elite boarding school, handed out by Mark and Cara Hadlow. The Hadlows are noblesse oblige: patrons of the arts, champions of the disadvantaged. When we first meet Dave […]

“The economy’s in ruins, no one’s got a job, and we just don’t care, it’s bliss.”

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

by 1 Comment

It’s 1983. Thatcher is at No. 10 and Nick Guest, age 21, has just graduated from Oxford University. He finds himself as a lodger at the house of a college friend, Toby, whose father Gerald Fedden has been elected as a promising new conservative MP. Nick, who comes from a solidly middle class background, finds himself a loose thread intricately woven into the upper class social fabric of the Freddens. Nick has the wrong background and the wrong predilections, and he knows it doesn’t take […]

bit of an omnibus for the year end

Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery

Anne of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow, Ann Friedman

by Leave a Comment

Buried Deep and Other Stories (⭐⭐⭐⭐ but for the ones I read) Did I get this only to re-visit the world of Temeraire? You bet! I felt, I think like many people, that Novik got a bit fed up of her Dragon + Napoleonic Wars world by the end, with the whimsy and joy taken over by staid descriptions of military marches and food depots. This was a way to return to the original joy, especially since one of the retellings was of Pride and […]

He was so unknown, he was still all possibility, unopened cupboards and drawers

The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst

by Leave a Comment

I had a discussion with Classic a few weeks ago in the comments section of her review for The Paying Guests, which she said started off very slowly. At the time, I happened to be about 100 pages into Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star, and I’d been worrying about how slowly it was moving until I thought back to the same time last year when I read his most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, which didn’t really click for me until the last 50 pages. […]

Beauty, Sex, Drugs, and Scandal

by Leave a Comment

I’ve lost track of how many people I have told about my notable experience with sleep paralysis last year, which included a very strange dream with Dan Stevens that was related to said experience with sleep paralysis. However, this led me to watching a LOT of Dan Stevens content in the months that followed. This has nothing to do with this novel, except for the fact that upon referencing some info for my review, I find that there was a miniseries adaptation of the book […]

27: The Sparsholt Affair

by Leave a Comment

You know how travelling forces you to make decisions about books? I had a terrible dilemma this last week. I’d been steadily reading and enjoying Alan Hollinghurst’s newest novel, The Sparsholt Affair, when we were packing to leave for Florida for four days. I had twenty pages left as of an hour before our Lyft picked us up. And I had to leave the book behind. It was agony. Thankfully, I got to finish it when we returned home on Friday. And what a worthwhile […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo