Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The book House of Tribes was better than House of Names

House of Names by Colm Toibin

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I have always had a spot of obsession with the Matter of Troy. Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War was the first adult program I was allowed to stay up and watch. So say connect something to Troy and I am there like white on rice (except I prefer brown rice unless I am making risotto. But brown rice with some butter yum!). So when I heard about this book I had to read it. And then it was like – really, this […]

Snoooooooze.

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Sometimes I read something and I wonder if I have just really missed the point. Such is the case with Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster. Nora Webster takes place in Ireland in the late 1960s, a time of social turmoil and ripe for interesting story-telling. It is the same town in which the heroine of his novel Brooklyn was raised but aside from a quick cameo by her mother, it’s not really a sequel by any means. Nora has recently lost her husband Maurice (to what […]

A fictionalized Henry James.

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During my dissertation writing phase of life (THANK GOODNESS IT’S OVER), my second reader recommended The Master, since I had written a chapter on Henry James and his take on the novel of manners, which was then adapted by Jeffery Eugenides in The Marriage Plot and Alan Hollinghurst in The Line of Beauty. Emmalita graciously gifted me this book for the CBR book exchange a few years back, and now I’ve finally read it! It’s a really enjoyable, interesting, and well-written book. Henry James is […]

A little coming of age tale that’s left me surprisingly cranky.

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So does anyone else have favorite narrators for audiobooks? I’m sure folks do, and I have found for the ladies my favorite is Ms. Kirsten Potter. I first heard her do the Station Eleven audiobook, and since then I’ll listen to anything she reads. When she’s narrating a book that’s already on my TBR list? Dunzo. Brooklyn is the story of Ellis Lacey. Ellis is a young woman in small town Ireland with almost no prospects. When a kindly priest from Brooklyn offers to help her […]

Happy St Patrick’s Day

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I worked late tonight but felt obligated to write my review of the charming Brooklyn on St. Patrick’s Day in honor of Eilis Lacey’s Irish heritage. Eilis is from a small Irish town where jobs are scarce following WW2. She moves to America where she works in a store and begins taking bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. At a local dance hall she meets an Italian boy, Tony, who she begins a relationship with despite their difference in heritage (which is a huge deal). After […]

A Quietly Lovely Book

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I was aware of the movie before the book. I read rave reviews, and it has Domhnall Gleeson, so I knew it was going to be on my List Of Movies To Eventually See (I am terrible at going to see movies in theaters for the most part). I’m not sure when I realized it was based on a book, a tidbit I filed away until Valentine’s Day. My husband and I aren’t necessarily the most romantic–okay, I’m not, so for us Valentine’s Day involved Deadpool, our […]



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