Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


A strange book that went too long

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

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Note: I read this book in English, but I thought this (Russian?) cover was cool. So I swear I read this book because somewhere it was recommended as an interesting take on climate change, but it wasn’t actually about climate change. I borrowed the ebook from the library, so I can’t go back and confirm, but I SWEAR the intro specifically says that the book is NOT about climate change. Something bad happened to the sun I think (I’m having trouble remembering because once I […]

“In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside – there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions.”

High Rise by J.G. Ballard

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Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening. This book is why Good Omens has the quote, “It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism” in it. It opens with someone eating an Alsatian, which tells you all you need to know about where this is going. The first time I had anything to do with High Rise is when I was laid up with Bell’s palsy and listened to the audiobook narrated by Tom […]

JG Ballard

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

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“Wars came early to Shaghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.” This a roman a clef more or less by J.G. Ballard, or even something close to a kind of autofiction or memoir/novel based on his experiences as an adolescent living in Shanghai, the son of British colonial figures, at the start of World War II, and eventually his time in […]

High-Rise

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

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I first read this novel after I saw the initial trailer for the Tom Hiddleston movie version a few years back. I liked it fine. But since then, I’ve read a half dozen or more of Ballard’s novels, and all of his short fiction, and I think I have his wavelength (dear god, right?) quite a bit more now. I liked it a lot more the second time. The novel takes place in a all-inclusive high-rise replete with gyms, grocery stores, and other amenities. If […]

Suddenly, he felt a paradoxical sense of loyalty…

The Complete Stories of JG Ballard by JG Ballard

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It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to talk about 98 short stories written over 40 years. But this was an interesting and exhausting reading experience. There’s a lot going on here. So to begin at the beginning, JG Ballard was a British science fiction writer, known mostly to me via the 1995 David Cronenberg movie Crash and the Stephen Spielberg’s movie Empire of the Sun. A few years ago I saw the trailer for High Rise and was blown away. The movie itself is not […]

Hi. I’m Badkittyuno, and I’ve fallen behind again…

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Hi. Sorry. I really thought I was like 10 reviews behind and it turned out to actually be 19. So then I started up this list of reviews…and didn’t post it…and now I’m 26 behind. I would blame my kids/divorce/life, but really — I’d much rather read than write! Also, I’ve been working from home a lot and doing laundry instead of writing reviews (which is what I do when I get bored at the office), so that’s not helping. Anyway, here’s 26 brief reviews […]



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