Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Bad books make for a good read

Bad Book Club by Robin Ince

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Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club is a funny and interesting tour through some of the books you will never find in Waterstones, hidden as they are inside charity and secondhand shops. Robin Ince has made a habit of collecting these books – the more esoteric or eccentric, the better – and reading them so that we don’t have to. Taking us into a world of ‘celebrity’ autobiographies (with those on the lower end of the fame scale and yet high on ego providing the more entertaining entries), specialist animal care books, pick-up tips for men, women’s secret fantasies, pseudo-science, New […]

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1/30/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:5 |

This book is a lot. #CBRBingo

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

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I was skeptical going in to this. If you’re following my reviews, you probably know that lit fic and I don’t always get along. And it was a bit dense, especially at first. I knew going in this was made up of a series of interlocking stories, which was probably another  reason I was wary. It’s actually cooler than that, though. The book is structured in a sort of mirror. The first story is set in the 18th century and is told as a diary, and in the second, the characters have a copy of the diary, etc. This goes […]

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11/30/2018 's CBR10 Review No:159 |

The madwoman in the attic.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

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I don’t know why I’m surprised I didn’t enjoy this. I nearly always react poorly to post-modernism. But, I really *wanted* to enjoy it. Every time I’ve read Jane Eyre, I’ve thought Bertha Rochester, née Mason, got a really shit deal. I’ve also thought it was really suspect that we don’t actually get any evidence of her going mad prior to being locked in an attic for years and years. I mean, if I’d been locked in an attic for that long maybe I would start getting a little violent and develop a fire bug, too. And who even knows what […]

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11/30/2018 's CBR10 Review No:155 |

Who Was…. Part two

Who Was..... by various

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Yes, I have mentioned the Who Is/Who Was series before, but I have several of the titles and could not let good reads go to waste! This time: Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.? and Who Was Barack Obama? and Who Was Amelia Earhart? and Who Was Charles Darwin are the “newest” ones devoured. Of course, pairing Martin Luther King, Jr. and Obama is natural. Two men of color who broke racial barriers. But why pair Earhart and Darwin, too? Earhart broke down barriers, too, though for women and helped bring aviation to the public. And Darwin changed the worlds […]

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11/9/2018 's CBR10 Review No:422 |

My least favorite of the series, but still worth reading, if you liked the first three.

Mother's Milk (Patrick Melrose, #4) by Edward St. Aubyn

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“Did you know,” said Patrick, addressing Seamus again, “that among the caribou herdsmen of Lapland, the top shaman gets to drink the urine of the reindeer that has eaten the magic mushrooms, and his assistant drinks the urine of the top shaman, and so on, all the way down to the lowest of the low who scramble in the snow, pleading for a splash of twelfth-generation caribou piss?” “I didn’t know that,” said Seamus flatly. “I thought it was your special field,” said Patrick, surprised. “Anyhow, the irony is that the premier cru, the first hit, is much the most toxic. […]

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10/22/2018 's CBR10 Review No:125 |

History develops. Art stands still

Aspects of the novel by E.M. Forster

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“Good writing can only be learned from good writing.” This book is a collection of lectures that Forster gave at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927. It grabs you immediately as he dismisses temporality and time periods in the discussion of the merits of novels and, instead, places all writers in the same room writing from some sort of shared humanity. “We may say that History develops, Art stands still” From that he sets out to deconstruct the novel, discussing it not as a set or defined thing, but instead picking out aspects that seem interesting to him. He does initially […]

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8/7/2018 's CBR10 Review No:25 |

The Outsiders

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

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Capital ‘L’ literature puzzles me as I often feel that it’s a giant waste of time while I’m in the middle, but then I get to the end and reflect on it, and I realize that having read the book was worthwhile. This sentiment couldn’t be more true than my feeling on finishing “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” On a surface perspective, I read 350 pages in which nothing really happened and the characters went nowhere. But on a deeper inspection, the pages roil with meaning and even though the characters ultimately don’t have much of an arc, I walked […]

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4/4/2018 's CBR10 Review No:7 |

If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

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This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that she was at one time arrested for the wrongful death of her mother, who overdosed […]

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4/29/2017 's CBR9 Review No:17 |


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