Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours.”

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

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I’m lucky.  I have the ability to work from home and am in a hyper-specific field so I can be secure in employment (knock on wood). But you guys, I miss going into the office. I miss making coffee or running to Starbucks if I’m feeling decadent. I miss hearing about my coworker’s unruly stepchildren, or my desk neighbor’s dating life. I miss rolling our eyes at meetings that could have been emails, or cooing over cute things that patients said during exams. I miss […]

When we came to the end, we loved it

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

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I picked up this novel because I enjoyed Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, though, as my review states, I was at a loss to explain exactly why I liked it. Ferris’s sense of humor appealed to me, though, and I like authors who don’t claim to have all the answers. Then We Came to the End is his first novel, and it is certainly a curiosity. Written in first-person plural point of view, the narrators’ “we” refers to the employees of an […]

Yeah, I’d have snubbed it too

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This is my first bingo square attempt, for having been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. And boy oh boy am I not surprised this didn’t get it.  I liked Then We Came To The End well enough; The Unnamed slightly less so. But MAN did I not care for this book. The plot revolves around our dentist protagonist and his attempt to track down the identity thief posting cultish religious (or anti-religious? The book insists it’s sort of both but reading this thing through […]

Religion, Identity, and Flossing

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To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a story of contradictions, which perhaps explains why I’ve been having trouble getting started on this review. I liked this novel, but I’m sort of at a loss to explain what I liked about it. Maybe it’s the darkly comic tone of the novel, or the interplay of characters. But mostly I think it’s because it raises a bunch of philosophical questions that it doesn’t really ever answer, and I’m a sucker for that. (Note, if that […]

I thrill when I drill a bicuspid….

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So here’s the thing. I had been gagging to read Ferris’s debut novel, Then We Came To The End, since it was published to near universal acclaim a few years ago. I finally got round to starting it at the end of March this year and hated it so much that I had to give up after 100 pages as I just couldn’t face reading another word. I hated all the characters and their tiresome situations. Having now read his latest, it affirms my suspicion about why […]



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