Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.”

Matrix by Lauren Groff

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I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise. Here, it’s nuns. I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to […]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]

“Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

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Look at me, reviewing a book I just finished yesterday*. I am determined to review all my October books in a timely fashion** so as not to make my backlog problem worse than it already is. (Sigh.) This was sort of a bummer one to start my October spooky reads on because it was all serious and stuff, no fun at all to be had here. But I can’t deny it was very well done. *But posted here in December, whoops. I finished this in […]

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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If this doesn’t make my top ten books of the year, I’ll eat something inedible. My cat does it all the time, how hard can it be? This book sucked my entire being into it while I was reading it, and I was a brainless husk just turning pages while my brain was flopping around in there having a grand old time. Sorry if that sounds gross but that’s what happened! I can’t change the facts! This is a book about friendship, love, and video […]

Dignity

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

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CBR14 BINGO: Adapt, because it was adapted into the wonderful 1993 film of the same name “I’m telling you, sir, you’ll be sorry if you don’t take a walk up there. And you never know. A couple  more years and it might be too late.” This advice from a stranger on a country road to the novel’s protagonist is meant to encourage the traveler to walk up a hill and enjoy a beautiful view, but it may as well be an observation about the protagonist’s […]

“We knew it was coming, but we behaved inconsistently.”

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Reading Emily St. John Mandel is like falling asleep to the sound of rain: The words wash over you and a steady drumbeat of beauty lulls you into something like perfect contentment. Just reading the loveliness of her sentences would be enough, but then she continues to dazzle by leading your thoughts into new possibilities about the universe, as your mind is apt to drift to questions of cosmic import in the moments before sleep, while those steady drops beat against your windowpane. It’s hard […]



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