Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence…

Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Tent by Margaret Atwood

Tiny Crimes by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

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Natural Causes – 3 Stars This is Barbara Ehrenreich’s muckraking polemic on the death industries. Kind of. It shares a lot of similarities with Jessica Mitford’s classic book(s) The American Way of Death (and The American Way of Death Revisited, which is probably the version to read these days), but rather than focusing on the funeral industry, which this book hardly mentions, the focus is on the prolonging of life that especially Americans put themselves through. This books covers health food, health fads, exercise, medicine, biology, bio-ethics, and and myriad other topics. The general thesis is that Americans focus so […]

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4/7/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:171 |

Prospero Atwood

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

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Oh my god.  How was this THIS good? This book shouldn’t have been this good.  The premise sounds insane. A retelling of The Tempest where our Prospero is an exiled theater director setting his own (previously thwarted) adaptation of The Tempest in a corrections facility.  It’s the definition of Should Not Work. Not only does it, it’s one of her best. Atwood intelligently uses meta text throughout the book, which made this (more than the other Hogarth Shakespeare I’ve read so far) feel more like interpretation rather than a simple retelling of the play. Willie Shakes does love his plays […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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3/31/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:23 |

Rennie can see what she is now: she’s an object of negotiation.

Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood

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(Photo:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/160728.Bodily_Harm) There’s a blurb on the back of my copy from Marilyn French, a more or less contemporary of Margaret Atwood’s, who says of this book “Romance and adventure by a female Graham Greene at his peak” and at first I thought it was dismissive in a strange way, but then I started reading, and thought — well, I’ll be damned. So it does share a lot of similarities with Graham Greene in a few key ways, or more with a certain set of Graham Greene’s book — it’s about a white Westerner (a middle class 40 year old woman […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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1/6/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:4 |

Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

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So I bought a house.  Moved my mother in with us in her own apartment. Sold her place. Renovated our old one to ready it for rental.  Got half new staff at work. Raising the tiny one.  It’s been a bit since I’ve posted, but life has been hectic.  Nothing like a nice relaxing read to soothe my jangled nerves, so of course I pick The Handmaid’s Tale to read (and make my coworker book club cohorts read for our first selection.) I’m a masochist. You know the plot, so did I.  It was my third time through.  I won’t […]

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9/17/2018 's CBR10 Review No:39 |

The play’s the thing

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

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CBR10Bingo: This Old Thing (The Tempest) and Birthday (Hag-Seed) I’m a big fan of Margaret Atwood’s novels. I haven’t read everything she’s written, but I have a shelf full of her books and have loved all but one (sorry, The Heart Goes Last). I always watch for her new releases, and she’s one of the rare exceptions I’ll make to buy hardcover. When Hag-Seed came out a few years ago, I was all excited and ready to buy, until I looked at the cover blurb and saw that it was a modern re-telling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play that […]

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9/8/2018 's CBR10 Review No:51 |

The power of Margaret Atwood compels you!

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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I liked this a lot, even if the central message can be boiled down to “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and that’s as provocative a statement as “water is wet.” A frame tale where academics use historical documents to reconstruct a past much like our present as gender imbalance creates a crisis point and reveal their own biases in the interpretation is gonna get compared to Margaret Atwood for obvious reasons.  To say this is not The Handmaid’s Tale is no slight to Alderman; even Atwood’s worst books are beautifully, elegantly, intricately written. Even the Rockies look like gravel […]

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6/10/2018 's CBR10 Review No:36 |

“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. ”

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

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Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood’s imagining of the true story of Grace Marks, a convicted (and later pardoned) murderess… “Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” … in 19th century Canada whose sensationalistic trial left doubt as to the nature of her involvement in the double murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/mistress Nancy Montgomery. Atwood utilizes what is […]

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6/5/2018 's CBR10 Review No:29 |

A modern Shakespeare

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

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What a fabulous read!!! I am a big fan of Shakespeare and am fast becoming a big fan of Margaret Atwood. This book is a modern take of The Tempest. What is fascinating about it, compared to other modern adaptations is the way is winds the play within the story, with the story itself. The story follows Felix, an Artistic Director. It begins with him preparing to put on the play, The Tempest. You learn that both his wife and more recently daughter, have passed away. Due to a number of theatre politics, he is fired from his position. He […]

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6/2/2018 's CBR10 Review No:19 |


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