Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Bleak House

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

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Sometimes I can write a 1000 word post on a short story or even a poem, but taking a 1000 page novel and figuring out what to do with it is too big a task. This novel begins with one of the absolute best opening chapters in all of English literature. The slow, meandering walk down the street outside the chancery courts with the absolutely disgusting yellow fog creeping in as an extended metaphor for the inhuman corruption of the court systems. Then the description […]

Hard Times for These Times

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

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So, Hard Times.  Or to give the book its full title, Hard Times for These Times.  And has there ever been a more perfect title for These Days? If you are unfamiliar with Charles Dickens, besides, perhaps, A Christmas Carol, there are a few things you ought to know about the man.  The man is, nearly always, On A Mission.  (OK, the Pickwick Papers is just plain fun.)  He’s from the Victorian era, newspapers have just been, more or less, invented, and his books are […]

It turns out that sometimes having a background in English literature pays off

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry

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Official book description: For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can’t quite control: he can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob – a young lawyer with an utterly normal life – hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other.   But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying […]

Somehow this all seems familiar

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry

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I don’t remember how I heard about The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, but I saw it on a library shelf not long after I heard about it, so of course I had to check it out (pun intended). The story concentrates on two brothers, Rob the older from whose perspective the story comes, and Charley the younger, genius of the sort who finished a PhD and publishes an academic book on Dickens at the age of nineteen. There is the usual kind of brotherly […]

Marley was dead.

A Christmas Carol by Jim Dale

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If you’re like me and you’ve listened to a lot of audiobooks, you might transpose your sense and understanding of one narrator associated with a particular author onto other authors when that narrator shows up later. So maybe John Lee’s presence on an audio addition of Lord Jim makes it feel like Jo Nesbo has just written that novel. Or maybe Simon Vance reading a contemporary British novel makes you feel like it’s written by Patrick O’Brien, Anne Rice, or Naomi Novik. And of course Frank […]

Bad blood carries. Bad blood comes out.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

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CBR10Bingo: The Book Was Better? This was another square I struggled to fill, until a flash of inspiration hit me. I remembered that I had bought Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden on a whim several months ago but never actually watched it, giving me the perfect excuse to buy and read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and then finally watch the film. Done and done.  Sue was born in a cramped house of thieves and orphaned when her mother was hanged for murder. Mrs. Sucksby has raised […]



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