Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Le temps viendra/Je anne boleyn

The Beheading Game: A Novel by Rebecca Lehmann

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The time will come/I Anne Boleyn    Anne Boleyn wakes up the night after her execution to find herself stuck in an arrow chest; #historicalfact. (the arrow chest, not the waking up.) Not knowing what bothers her more; the waking up with her head between her knees or her cheap ex not even giving her a coffin, she decides Providence helps them that helps themselves and gets herself (and her head) out. After a quick turn around with an embroidery needle, she’s no longer in […]

“To be so ravenous with desperation that the only way out is complete and utter annihilation. A torpedo made of your own sharpened body.”- Senaa Ahmad (or me about wanting to quit this book)

The Age of Calamities: Stories by Senaa Ahmad

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I bought this book for two reasons: the New York Times highly recommended it, and I have always had a fascination with Anne Boleyn and one of the stories was said to feature her. And now you get a story by story commentary on how very much a mistake that decision was. Let’s Play Dead: Right off the bat we have the Anne Boleyn story, and right off the bat I loathe this book. Henry VIII has Anne Boleyn’s head chopped off and the next […]

Rolling Heads

Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

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What you must never forget about this one is that you’re still in Wolf Hall. That’s trite, I know! But I can’t think of what else to say because as I reoriented my perspective on reading this, its power really hit me. I read Wolf Hall five years ago, at a different period in my life and thought it was just ok. Appreciated what it was doing but I didn’t have the focus to engage with it like I should have. Time and age tend to confer […]

This is not the Anne Boleyn you are looking for

Six Tudor Queens: Anne Boleyn, A King's Obsession by Alison Weir

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One of my great guilty pleasures these days is books and media related to Tudor history. It feels like a very specific combination of nerdy and basic to admit that you are super into Anne Boleyn and friends (too obvious for your average history buff, too esoteric for everyone else). But oh boy am I into it. The story of Henry the Eighth and his many wives has got more sex, death and twists than a soap opera and the best thing is that it […]

Anne Boleyn and the Case of the Unreliable Narrator

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I was fascinated by Anne Boleyn as a child. I saw a production of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, probably on Masterpiece Theater and was entranced by the idea of a queen who was executed by her King. My recent review of It Ended Badly reminded me that I had bought The Creation of Anne Boleyn after reading Gabby N’s CBR8 review, earlier this year. I didn’t realize how little is really known about Anne Boleyn. Susan Bordo examines the popular portrayals of Anne […]

What goes up. . . .

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This book deserves a better-written review than it’s going to receive from me, since I read it at the beginning of the year, didn’t write a review, and now it’s December 30th. My own damn fault. This is the sequel to Wolf Hall, the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell (and, at about the same time, Anne Boleyn). The king and Cromwell are staying with the Seymours at their home, Wolf Hall (which made me wonder why the first book was called that, since […]



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