Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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Cbr14Bingo – Font — While there’s a lot of talk of printing, printing errors, and handwriting in this book, I am mostly looking at this as a sober look at the facts we know about the life of Shakespeare with the dry wit and editorial selection prowess of Bill Bryson. This book looks at the history of Shakespeare, as a person, and tries to sort out the facts. What this means is that Bryson looks squarely at what we know for sure based on specific […]

“The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither.”

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

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CBR Bingo square: Home I’ve always loved Bill Bryson’s travelogues, but I haven’t read most of his other books. At Home has never interested me and I wouldn’t have read it if it hadn’t fit this Bingo square so well, but I should have known that if anyone can make the history of brick making interesting, it’s Bryson. The book is loosely structured as a tour through his family’s house in the English countryside, a former rectory built in the 1800s. Each chapter is devoted to […]

A little biology, a little history

The Body by Bill Bryson

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I know Bill Bryson from listening to his audiobook, A Walk in the Woods, over ten years ago. I remember enjoying it, so when I was looking for another good audio book for my commute and saw that The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019) was available, I checked it out. I found it consistently interesting and sometimes illuminating. It is a broad book that covers anything and everything related to health and life. This book is divided into sections and chapters discussing: skin, the head, the heart, […]

this woman’s work

If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley

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Bill Bryson’s delightful At Home: A Short History of Private Life came first, but Lucy Worsley’s If Walls Could Talk separates itself from the predecessor by being, well, more intimate! I promise this will be a review of If the Walls Could Talk, but if you are ever in need of a peaceful “sleep read” then I highly recommend plugging into the audio adaptation of Bryson’s book- it is seriously soothing. The biggest difference between At Home and If Walls Could Talk is the female perspective. Bryson’s book was framed around […]

“We all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.”

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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There is a lot to say about Shakespeare, but there is not a lot to know. Bill Bryson, everyone’s favorite kindly uncle, lays the facts bare while gently chiding all of the (mostly bonkers) “hopeful suppositions” that have been presented as facts by well-meaning and often obsessed fans, historians, and scholars. Bryson, himself an acolyte at the altar of Shakespeare, paints a bright and brisk portrait of the man that we know to be Shakespeare. We know very few things about him; there are only […]

“A Table of Alphabetical Hard Words”: Our First English Dictionary

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

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Quite a bit has changed since this book was written; language has changed, attitudes towards language have changed, and culture overall has changed. Some pieces from this book have not aged well; it’s rather dismissive of some languages and cultures (weirdly judgmental over Japanese writing, for example) while being aggressively defensive of others. There is also little-to-no attention paid  to the many additions given to English by marginalized communities; I was surprised to come across very little about the contributions of people of color have […]



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