Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Ariadne could tell the time by its closeness, three o’clock.

Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle

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This novel won the National Book Award in 1977. I have read and reviewed a handful of Mary Lee Settle novels, many of which take place in Virginia and West Virginia in various times in the history of those states. She is most well known for writing what is called the Beulah Quintet–five novels that tell the history of a county in West Virginia, starting with the original settlers being forced out of England during the English Civil War and moving toward the incorporation of […]

Perhaps I should stop seeing myself as an individual and start identifying myself with the totality, but I just can’t do that.

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The Faster I Walk….. 3/5 Stars I picked this one up because it was short and in the new books section of the library and I like little Scandinavian books, and this one was an odd and curious little gem of a book. The story here is about a woman living with a man and sort of trying to figure out who she is in the world. She’s closed off emotionally, she reads a lot, she thinks about death a lot, and she makes little […]

Mother, mother

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The Scapegoat – Mary Lee Settle This is the fourth book in the Beaulah Quinet, Mary Lee Settle’s history of West Virginia through the lens of conflicts ranging from the ousting of a Puritan partisan in the English Civil War (leading to immigration to America) to the settling and drawing of land parcels in the 18th century to a novel I haven’t read yet in the 1840s to this coal mining dispute in 1912 and finally to more or less contemporary times. Following one family, in […]

“How waste everything looks when ye can’t fix a name to it”

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So imagine the movie The VVitch taking place about a 100 years later, and in western Virginia/border of Ohio territory instead. There’s still lots of fear and anxiety but there’s no witch. Not even a little witch. This novel comes from a collection of novels by a novelist most (including me until about a year or so ago) from West Virginis named Mary Lee Settle. One of those novelists who spends her entire career at a university, even wins some awards, but maybe doesn’t have the […]



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