Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Longs and Shorts

The Big Book of Reel Murders by Ed. Otto Penzler

My Head! My Head! by Robert Graves

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Heart by Jade Anouka

Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch

The Ophelia Network by Mur Lafferty

Deep Hole by Don Winslow

Legal Immigrant by Alan Cumming

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

The Cube by Adam Rapp

Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Pale Sister by Colm Toibin

Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The Big Book of Reel Murders – Edited by Otto Penzler – 4/5 The concept of this collection is still mostly pulpy stories (though with some other older stories and more contemporary stories not really pulpy) that were made into films. It should really be called “Reel Crimes” as not every story involves a murder, but the concept mostly works. It ends up being a little frayed throughout as apparently it’s just much easier to get some rights to stories than others, so like the […]

A Severed Head

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

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You can’t call a novel a quintessential Iris Murdoch novel because her novels often take one of a number of possible forms. Of the forms: a group of adults who fall in and out of love with each other and a lot of drinking, smoking, sending of letters, and philosophizing occurs. Here we begin with Martin Lynch-Gibbon who married to Antonia, friends with Palmer Anderson (her psychiatrist), brother to Alexander, and having an affair with Georgie. He thinks things are more or less going fine […]

I brung Pedro home for Thanksgiving break and tomorrow I have to bring him back to school.

Providence by Caroline Kepnes

Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch

High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Real Sherlock by Lucinda Hawksley

Agent 355 by Marie Benedict

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Providence: 2/5 Stars The newer novel by Caroline Kepnes of YOU fame. It’s…well, it’s not great. There’s so many of the same pieces that made You a good, if goofily rehashed novel, are there, but serving this story they just don’t work as well. The plot here is that a young boy is kidnapped by a former substitute teacher. While he’s missing his best friend grows into her adolescence and loses touch with that connection, but she’s haunted by images of his eyes, his presence, […]

If it was not madness, then there was only one other thing it could be.

The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch

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Like a lot of Iris Murdoch novels we have a cast of characters circulating both a place (this time a rectory) and a figure of some power, presence, or influence over that place: here, the rector Carel. Carel is aging, possibly falling prey to mental illness, which either explains or seeks to excuse his moral and religious failings. Religous failings: he’s becomes increasingly convinced/aware that there is no god. Normally, you might guess that this would make it difficult to be a rector, but he […]

People always think their art is the end of art.

Acastos - Two Platonic Dialogues by Iris Murdoch

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This book contains two dialogues written as if to be performed, but I listened to the audiobook read by a single narrator and it was fine. Iris Murdorch, along with being an accomplished novelist is also a trained philosopher with a PhD and so course understands the nature of philosophy and philosophical discussion, elements that show up in many of her novels, and especially that of the relationship between master and mentee/student and teacher. These dialogues, one about the nature and role of art in […]

His own beauty, such as it was, had certainly consumed away some time ago.

An Unofficial Rose by Iris Murdoch

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This is a semi-early novel by Iris Murdoch (early 1960s), about her sixth or so, and comes across as an both an interesting blend of the early kind of savageness of Under the Net and some of the later mellowing in her longer novels of the 1980s. Murdoch often writes and rewrites different versions of her novels in different settings. Her second novel Flight from the Enchanter is a model that she explores many different times with different kinds of enchanter figures. Another theme she […]



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