I moved to Monterey, CA last summer and decided that while I was here I would read Stienbeck’s catalog. He’s from this area and writes a lot about it. East of Eden takes place a town over in Salinas. The town is now home of the National Steinbeck museum. Cannery Row takes place on Monterey’s Cannery Row. Needless to say, there is a lot of Steinbeck here. Before The Pearl, the only Steinbeck I’d read were East of Eden and Of Mice and Men. I […]
Fave play is fave
“None but libertines delight in him.” Claudio and Hero love each other and want to get married. Beatrice and Benedick….well that’s what the play is about. Look this play makes no fucking sense what-so-ever. I mean, why is Hero wooed by someone else, in a mask? Why the fuck does Dogberry stumble around? And Claudio is dickweasel numero uno for believing Don John whatshisface…who meddles to actually give the play a plot. But then again, this is much ado about nothing so it does make […]
Great expectations: why did this have to be my first cannonball
So my first ever Cannonball review and boy I wish it didn’t have to be this book. One of the things I want to achieve with my cannonball is to reawaken my love of reading. As a teenager through to my early years at college I loved reading but somewhere along the way, like an old friend, I lost touch with my passion for books. Don’t get me wrong I still read a couple of books a year usually on holiday but that side of […]
Another “Catcher in the Rye”
This book was painful. I’ve been hearing about Joy Williams frequently in my MFA and she shows up in almost every single faculty presentation. So I decided I should see what all the hype is about and I finally bit the bullet with “The Changeling”…I like Irish Fairy stories…I’m writing a novel threaded around the Changeling idea…it was just reprinted and has a pretty high star rating on Goodreads. Goodreads lies. This felt a lot like “Catcher in the Rye.” There was decent prose, there […]
Nicholson Flew Over the Place Where Birds Roost
I make a “not bucket list” every year of things I’d like to do in the upcoming year and read/watch “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” made the cut, so it was the perfect thing to tackle during a mini Spring Break-staycation. Randle Patrick McMurphy is a gambling con-man in the 196os who trades a stint on a prison work farm for a stay in an asylum. The men’s only asylum has a rich cast of characters who are battling their own personal demons, but […]
If you have sex, you will get pregnant and you will die
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Victorian-era woman who gets her hoe on will get her divine comeuppance. 19th century literature is like an 80s horror movie-you have sex, you die. It doesn’t matter if the woman is cheating on her husband, or straight-up raped by her boss-extramarital hanky-panky must be punished. I decide to combine my reviews of Madame Bovary and Tess of D’Urbervilles, rather than spending two reviews covering a lot of the same ground. *spoilers for some really old books* […]