Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 |

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

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My friend M. found the beginning of this book to be quite pretentious. And it is.  It’s pretentious AF for the first 60 or so pages.  And it’s hard to read pretention too.  The first few pages, especially, seem to drag and serve no purpose other than to make you re-think your decision to read it. But, I’m here to tell you that, while the first part of The Marriage Plot is definitely pretentious, it’s pretentious for a reason.  The pretention of Madeline and her parents and her classmates at Brown, including her boyfriend Leonard and her want-to-be-boyfriend, Mitchell, all […]

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3/20/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:10 |

Home Is Where the Heart Is…

A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash

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The library bookstore is my secret addiction. I don’t get to go often (at least, not in my county, what with the powers that be cutting library hours to a ridiculous degree), but when I do go, I load up. And I would say that of the books I pick up, I have about a 50% success rate. I donate the rest back, which results in a vicious circle where I’ve been known to re-buy previous rejects. (Yeah, I know.) Anyway, of that 50% success rate, about half of those are guilty pleasure romance novels that are easily read but […]

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2/9/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:3 |

To run a shtinker, you have to see the broken heart inside the deadest pan.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

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My first Chabon! OOOOOOF. WOW. Holy crap, you guys, did you know that his prose is exceptional and that there’s no exposition, and that he creates an utterly believable alternate timeline and a narrative that ramps up until you’re flying down the other side of the rollercoaster with no brakes? Are they all like this? Is my brain going to melt? How have I missed out this my entire adult life? Full disclosure: it took me a really long time to gather momentum with “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.” It’s my fault. No, really. I had confused Chabon with Carré, and […]

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12/28/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:53 |

Art is an incitement to look at our world through another’s eyes

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

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While Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life is nearly twenty years old, the first I heard of it was on a 2015 episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast. If you’re unfamiliar with Ferriss, he is outwardly a life-hacking blogger and podcaster. However, his deeper drive seems to be helping others live an examined life. I like that, so even though I’m not a life-hacky guy I listen to his show. On that 2015 episode, I found Botton to be especially charming, and I was interested in his comments that philosophy was increasingly becoming irrelevant to the average person because […]

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11/12/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:32 |

No man here lives a charmed life.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

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Okay, I’m probably operating on far too little sleep to write a coherent review, but here goes. The prose here is a luminous dream, casting it’s shadows upon the mind and lulling the reader into a warm and tranquil languidity. Coming so fast on the heels of the tenaciously awkward writing of Stephanie Meyer, the fluidity exhibited by Conrad is both refreshing in its rarity and a disheartening reminder that I can never be the writer I often dream that I am. This story has always held a deep fascination for me. Perhaps because Apocalypse Now has always represented a […]

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9/8/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:79 |

Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

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ETA 4/21/16: I messed up when I marked two reviews in a row as #46, so this review actually isn’t my Cannonball. That honor belongs to my dubious review of Captive Prince. Shame on many fronts. The mistake has now been noted on both reviews. This is the third in my series of reviews wherein I get weird and write them in the form of letters to the characters. I’m re-reading all of Jane Austen’s books in 2016, and it shall be glorious. One every two months means March was Pride and Prejudice month, and Pride and Prejudice is my favorite of […]

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4/15/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:53 |

Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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A couple of years ago for CBR6, I re-read Jane Eyre, and because I was overwhelmed with the task of writing a review for such a classic book, I decided to get weird and write the review in the form of letters to the characters. Since then, with an eventual plan to re-read all of Jane Austen’s books, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that I’d do the same with as many future classic books that I could. So. This is me doing that. And I’ll be doing it all year for the rest of Austen’s books, […]

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Purchase Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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2/18/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:29 |

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