Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Beautiful, thoughtful, heartbreaking

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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My white whale!  I have been trying and failing to read Atonement for about three years, so I am excited to say that not only have I finished it, but I really enjoyed it! The other times I have started reading, I have remained stuck in the book’s opening section, which covers the course of one summer day in the 1935 at the country house of the Tallis family. The Tallis’ youngest child, Briony, is a precocious creative sort who has written a play she […]

Rise of the Vermin

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

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Bonnie reviewed this on here, it sounded very much relevant to my interests, so I ordered it and read it in one sitting. Don’t remember the last time I did this and to be fair, Cockroach is very short, but it still felt great to do this again. The book is Ian McEwan’s take on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, except that instead of a young depressed man turning into a beetle, a cockroach turns into a powerful buffoon, namely the British Prime Minister. This Prime Minister – […]

What are you hiding underneath that skin suit?

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan has his hits and misses, but by gum, everything he writes is memorable. It’s interesting to see him return to short fiction, since that’s where his career started. I don’t remember all the stories from , but I DO remember opening my mouth in shock a few times. He didn’t earn the nickname “Ian Macabre” for nothing. And with The Cockroach, we DEFINITELY get some wild and memorable moments. If you read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and thought “This, but in reverse,” you’ll be […]

At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad…

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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This is a novel that lost the Booker Prize (in a competitive race along with David Mitchell) to The True History of the Kelly Gang. This is also a novel I was avoiding for a long time because it seemed quite likely to simply be more or less like the movie (and in plenty of ways it is), but ended up being a lot more compelling, more serious, and more thoughtful than the film ever hoped to be. If you don’t this book or film, Briony […]

Horrible. But he was acquiring the knack of steering his new form.

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

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This book is bad and Ian McEwan should feel bad for writing it. I think about a review for his newest book that was reviewed here and it’s funny to me how angry the review was. I am not angry because I knew going in it would be bad and embarrassing, but they had it at the library and I knew I’d be too curious to pass it up. Mostly I think political writing and especially political novels are already a really bad idea. I […]

You can hate the heroine; don’t hate the novel

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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CBR11bingo: History/Schmistory (historical fiction) BINGO: Two Heads Are Better Than One, Back to School, Own Voices, Classics, History/Schmistory While having lunch with a friend recently, we started talking about books and he mentioned that he doesn’t have any use for novels that are “about writing.” On reflection, I realized I am often quite taken with novels that could be classified as metafiction (The Magpie Murders, The Word is Murder/The Sentence is Death, and, going all the way back to CBR V, The Tragedy of Arthur). So […]



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