Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Better to Have Loved and Lost And be Literary Apparently

Artful by Ali Smith

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I’m not sure the best way to come into this novel. I came in knowing nothing about, feeling confused by the end of chapter 1 and then diving into internet search to find out more. This a slow moving meditation on loss and love, how our lives enmesh with those around us and the imprints their leave on them when they go. It’s based on a series of 4 lectures Ali Smith gave; On Time, On From, On Edge, and On Offer and On Reflection. I say based […]

Artful – Ali Smith (2012)

Artful by Ali Smith

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In an essay and kind of novel form, Ali Smith writes about a writer who begins seeing the ghost of her dead partner, who appears in spectre-form, performing actions, sometimes saying words, and bringing up an untold number of memories. Challenging these images too is the relatively short amount of time that relationship lasted before her partner’s death. This is a meditative and mourning book is beautifully evocative about life, death, what form and presence another takes in our life, and about those traces. It’s […]

Everybody said: so? As in so what?

Summer by Ali Smith

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The closing volume of the Seasons Quarter by Ali Smith. Arguably, this is the best or at least most impressive of the books, but I will get to that. The books are not sequels, so you can read them in any order. Instead, each novel focuses on a season (and things attached to that season) and generally try to capture the current moment (as of publication) while also trying to place things within broader contexts or connected thematic moments. So in this book, the absolute […]

The truth is kind of regardless.

Spring by Ali Smith

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Much like the two previous novels in this series, Ali Smith’s Spring is a novel of the times. But more than simply being a story told within our zeitgeist, there’s a lot going on here. While the first, Autumn, spent a lot of time thinking about Brexit, this novel moves into the world of Trump, without mentioning Trump more than a few times. The focus is less about the world itself so much as the chaos, uncertainty, and disruption we feel (irrespective of whether or […]

That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.

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I was wondering going into this novel whether or not it was a continuation of the characters and stories of Autumn. And it isn’t. Autumn is the first of the Ali Smith novels I have really enjoyed. I have maintained the ideas that a)she’s a very good writer, b) she’s going to be considerably important in years to come, c) I am deeply interested in her work, and d) she will win a Booker Prize before too long. Perhaps this is it. Autumn was better […]

42: In the seasonal sequence, we see the consequences of nationalism.

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I am fresh off the Autumn reading high, and I am so curious to see how Ali Smith is going to use the seasons to make social commentary. I read both Autumn and Winter fairly quickly, so there is absolutely something compelling about Ali Smith’s literary style that has grabbed me. In Winter, Smith completely changes the characters and basic plot, although the post-Brexit Britain is ever in the foreground. This time, Sophia and Art, a mother and son, are the major characters. Sophia is […]



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