Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name…”

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

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3.5 stars Nowhere Books Bingo: Banned books (Wasn’t published until 27 years after Bulgakov’s death, and only then in a censored version. ) CBR16 Bingo: Cult (cult classic, and there’s the whole Devil and his entourage as a central plot point – that’s pretty cultish, right?) I can’t remember exactly how long The Master and Margarita has been on my TBR list, but it’s certainly more than twenty years. A quick glance on Goodreads shows me that 15 of my friends have rated it four […]

The devil went down to Moscow

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

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This was my first ‘Russian master’ novel, and without having read any others, I am here to tell you: start with this one: it was so.much.fun! (Cbr13bingo Gateway square). These are things I feel like I have heard no one ever utter about War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and so I feel like if you’re going to start somewhere, it should be somewhere fun. The Master and Margarita is like a Eugene Ionesco absurdist play in novel form, with the focus on Stalinist Russia. […]

Is Bulgakov a Russian Edward Gorey?

Black Snow by Mikhail Bulgakov

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Mikhail Bulgakov must have had a thing for cats. He’s must have been like the Russian Edward Gorey or something because there are cats in this book.  Gorey was so well known for his cats that Tove Jansson (yes that one) wrote a story short about it. Satan, however, is of a different from than cat in this book. If Satan is in this book, he is the powers that control the theater and drive an author to the end of his rope. This isn’t […]

‘One can find time for everything if one is never in a hurry,’ explained his host didactically.

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

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So I might be the only person I know who doesn’t absolutely love The Master and Margarita, but I did really like this really bizarre little novella. This story is a kind of Pygmalion, a kind of Frankenstein, a kind of George Schuyler’s Black No More, and a touch of the episode of Futurama where Bender becomes human. This story starts with a dog thinking upon his own situation, eating trash, living rough on the street, and sleeping in the cold. He is brought into the warm house of a […]

The Devil in Moscow

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Have you ever had a conversation where everything you said turned out to be the wrong thing? You think you are following the rules of polite conversation, but the other person keeps changing the rules. Now imagine that you are having that conversation with someone who can ruin your life. This is Mikhail Bulgakov’s seditious satirical masterpiece The Master and Margarita. I have a tremendously difficult time writing an even somewhat satisfying review for The Master and Margarita. It is such a layered novel, and […]



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