Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Shorts and Re-reads

Ripley Underground by Patricia Highsmith

Disgrace by Ayad Akhtar

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

Agnes of God by John Pielmeier

The Lion in Winter by James Goldman

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Ripley Underground – 4/5 The second Tom Ripley novel begins with the revelation that we’re about ten or so years on from the first novel, that Tom is now married and living off his “inheritance” from Dickie’s forged will. He’s in London and he’s become involved in an art forgery scheme. Recently an artist whom Tom had been connected with became a lucrative commodity and Tom was able to facilitate the sale of the artist’s work after he died. No one really knew for sure […]

Toward the End of the Morning

Toward the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn

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This is one of those British novels from the 1960s that is trying to capture the changing tone and impulses in the country stemming from the end of the war and the institution of the welfare state, and of course, the end of Empire. The novel takes places in a dying, middling paper on Fleet Street, the slightly mythic part of London with the famous daily papers. Our two main character is a married man named John Dyson, who foolishly bought a mediocre house in […]

In fact, as I get used to the idea in the days that follow, it begins to make sense of a lot of things.

Spies by Michael Frayn

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I’ve had this book for a number of years and never got around to reading it. I am not entirely sure why, but I also put it in a Little Free Library clearing out shelf space, but I recently picked it back out of there to finally read it. I had read an article about what British schools make kids read and this was on one of the lists. It’s about a group of boys during WWII who play a game that they become entirely […]

A play about physics, but not about physics.

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In my binge on plays after viewing the sampler from the PBS special, I included Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, which promised to be set during World War II. As it turns out, the play is far more complicated than that. Based on historical figures and an actual historical event, Copenhagen covers the relationship between scientists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, with feedback from Bohr’s wife Margrethe. The play opens in an indeterminate time, because all three characters have died and are now talking in […]



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