Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Who are all these people and why should I care?

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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So, I am one of those heathens that read Station Eleven and didn’t love it. There are dozens of us. DOZENS! But I liked it well enough, I guess (?), to want to read Mandel’s follow-up, The Glass Hotel. It’s hard to summarise the plot of this book, as it is kind of a meandering mess. We meet lots of people, they are somehow interconnected, things happen. Let me pick one person, who I _think_ is supposed to be the protagonist: Vincent. The book starts […]

The trajectory of choices

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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I spent the last several minutes trying to locate a passage in The Glass Hotel that demonstrated both the quality of the writing and the premise of the novel. I came up short. The problem with The Glass Hotel, which is a very good book bordering on great, is at times it feels steeped in metaphor that has no clear meaning the reader can ascribe. Takeaways from the novel will likely vary from reader to reader and I think it may change depending on the […]

Station Eleven, a book about the end and the continuation, about, life, art, and time.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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To write about writing is a strange exercise. When we view stories, we usually view them, somewhat, as experiences, more than as texts. This adds a dynamic dimension, one that is difficult to capture when reviewing and critiquing literature. I talk from the point of my experience of the literature in these writings, but there is undeniable a connection, between the quality of language, of development of setting and character, and the use of the devices of writing, in how the experience of the reader […]

Not my “best of” but YMMV.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Memorial by Bryan Washington

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In which it becomes clear to me that a “best of” list means next to nothing. I’m trying (and doubt I will make it) to catch up with my long backlog list from 2020 and to actually reach my goal of 52 reviews. Putting together mini-groups to review together has made this somewhat easier, and yes, I know that some of my groupings are probably random. Here we have two books that I thought were fine. I probably wouldn’t recommend them to friends, but if […]

“It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another.”

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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I’ve seen a number of comparisons between Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel (2020) by Emily St. John Mandel. It seems that the majority of people prefer Station Eleven. I remember liking Station Eleven, but it has been so long I honestly cannot remember it well enough to compare it to The Glass Hotel. And I really liked The Glass Hotel–probably more than many of the reviews I’ve seen. The plot is kind of hard to sum up. There are a lot of characters that may overlap but don’t necessarily have too much […]

Not as good as her last one

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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Official book description: Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent’s half-brother, Paul, scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune Logistics, sees the note from […]



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