Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Call and Answer

Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman

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What a lovely read. The language was lovely, almost lyrical. Very little actually happens but the author takes us on such a journey that we believe so much has happened. This is a relatively short review, simply to resist giving away the pieces of the book you should enjoy by reading it yourself. Elio is a young man falling for an older man who is visiting his house over the summer. The story slowly builds into an obsession. The tension is built through everything that […]

Italian Football (Soccer/Calcio): Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

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Read for Cannonball Read Bingo: place I want to visit. It’s tough to know where to begin describing this book because it is a wild 528-page ride. John Foot is a competent writer and a quality historian but he’s been tasked with a subject that’s overwhelming: the story of soccer in Italy. Foot does a great job at covering the history of Italy as a backdrop to its nation’s favorite sport and I learned a lot. I had no idea how young of a nation […]

The Glory of my Favorite Illustrator

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The end of March 2018 saw a reissue of a Tomie dePaola classic Big Anthony and the Magic Ring (now called Strega Nona’s Magic Ring). The beginning of March saw a reissue of The Clown of God (last night was the first time I could read without crying my eyes out). And early April saw a rare site: dePaola’s text and illustrations by Doug Salati with, In a Small Kingdom. It is a miracle I can tear myself away from reading them! (Yes, my friends, […]

“Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”

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I’ve always confused A Room with a View with A Room of One’s Own. I recently reviewed a book about how to understand literature, and it recommended one or both of those two books. I can’t remember which. I’ll read them both! Amazon recently released a free version of A Room with a View, so I downloaded and gave it the old college try. ARWAV, as the kids call it (no they don’t) is clever, cheeky, romantic, and Romantic. I may not be the target audience for the book, but […]

The Review of the Great Books

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I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good […]

A book that puts the privilege of my education in stark relief

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Whatever “it” is, this book has it. Unsurprisingly, The Neapolitan Novels series has been among the much-discussed darlings of the lit fic world — a world that I largely ignore, as I mainly stick to genre. Despite sounding intriguing enough to prompt me to read it, I still knew very little about it. And so, Elena Greco and Lila Cerrullo came to me freshly conceived, raw and open and complex, out of their run-down and violent neighborhood, seeking an opening to become something more than […]



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