Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The Adventure of the Myopic Solicitor

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

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The unlikely duo in the title of Julian Barnes’s novel are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and George Edalji, a mixed-race son of a vicar who becomes the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Barnes follows each of them from their beginnings in life until the point at which circumstances conspire to throw them together. Sir Arthur’s life story is better known, but Barnes goes all the way back to the beginning when Arthur, son of a wastrel, resolves to make a […]

“To be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie”

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

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I read and loved Flaubert’s Parrot in college, so I was really looking forward to reading another book by Barnes, especially a book that won the Booker Prize in 2011.  The Sense of Ending is a slim novella that winds a lot of ideas into its relatively few pages.  The plot outline is fairly simple: our first person narrator, a retired Brit divorcee named Tony Webster, receives a lawyer’s letter informing him that he has been left a diary in a will.  The diary belonged […]

How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic.

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes

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This is an odd book…a kind of novel in stories, but not one in which the stories are particularly connected together in terms of character or voice or plot. Instead they are thematically connected along a few various leitmotifs. One, is boats, ships and other such vessels playing along the the various ways in which boats are used as story elements and metaphors in the Bible. The opening story involves a nonhuman narrator on the Ark. This opens up and elucidates some of the fog […]

Good for Francophiles; for others, not so much

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I hate not finishing a book. The literature student in me feels compelled to give every author his due, and there was a time when I would have slogged through anything no matter how disinterested I was. Now that I’m older and one would hope wiser, I’ve realized that life is short and there are times when I should cut my losses and move on to something that makes me happy. I’ve always had a love–meh relationship with Julian Barnes, so it surprised me at […]

Can a story about the fall of a Soviet regime stand up 25 years later?

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When The Porcupine was published in 1992, the world was still absorbing the dramatic events of the anti-Communist revolutions that started in the late 1980s, culminating in the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Influenced by these events, Barnes spun this tale that takes place in a fictional Soviet satellite country that some critics will swear is based on Bulgaria, while others will insist it’s obviously inspired by Romania. In this unnamed nation, the Communist Party has […]

“I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction.”

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

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This is a funny, playful book. It most definitely does not seem like it should be. It starts with a nameless narrator looking for a stuffed parrot. I know, I know. But specifically it’s the parrot that the French writer Flaubert used as inspiration while writing his short story “A Simple Heart”, which I also read before starting this. This parrot, we are led to believe, sat on the desk having been borrowed from a museum until Flaubert became so annoyed and frustrated by it […]



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