Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I Wish I Could Explain Why I Liked This

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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CBR18 BINGO: using the Free Space to replace Joker I hated this when I read it in high school. That was so long ago that I don’t recall why, but my guess is that 16-year-old Tracy had Strong Feelings™ about how books were supposed to end and objected to how this one ended. I’m not sure what made me try it again, but I’m glad I did. I really liked it! Um. I’m just not sure why. This is actually a challenging book to rate […]

The Great Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I was watching a bunch of kids last week and after a full morning at the pool there was a moment of quiet as they all became engrossed in their various screens. I didn’t want to disturb the peace and I also didn’t want to do chores, and I couldn’t find my Kindle, so I reached over the bookshelf and I picked up the dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby that I purchased in approximately 1999 – I was delighted to see my youthful handwriting […]

Making the Sausage – Hollywood Style

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

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cbr17bingo Arts Schulberg, the son of a successful Hollywood producer, is probably best known for his screenplays (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd), but he started as a novelist with What Makes Sammy Run?, about a Hollywood publicist. This book follows about ten years later, and is the thinly fictionalized story of an ill-fated trip Schulberg made with F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Dartmouth.  Fitzgerald was nearing the end of his life and was trying to scrape together cash by working on screenplays for […]

A lesson for Nick Carraway. Don’t talk to your neighbors.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I remember having a choice on my summer reading list going into Freshman year of High School. We had to pick one book from a few different categories. From one category, we already had two of the books sitting on the bookshelf in my dad’s study. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. For some reason that eludes me now, my 13-year-old past self chose The Old Man and the Sea. I can appreciate Hemingway’s […]

Lost in (audiobook) translation

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of the Jazz Age hit a milestone birthday- 95!- meaning that it fell into the public domain at the end of 2020. One of the podcasts I listen to, Planet Money, used that milestone as a reason to release a podcast episode that was an audiobook of the novel, as read by its hosts. Its been years since I last read The Great Gatsby, and in that interim I’ve read Ernest Hemingway’s non-fiction account of his time in Paris in […]

Ten mostly good fiction books

Normal people by Sally Rooney

Conversations with friends by Sally Rooney

The amateur marriage by Anne Tyler

The pull of the stars by Emma Donoghue

Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Holes by Louis Sachar

The princess bride by William Goldman

The legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Normal people by Sally Rooney I’d watched the series before I read the book and yet the series didn’t put me off reading it. I suffered through it, just as I suffered through this book about Marianne and Connell. Two kids who go to the same school, and then later on to the same university, their lives entwined. We witness their strange dance as they struggle to communicate plainly with each other and fail again and again. Marianne is a broken person. Connell is sort […]



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