Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hear the Fearsome War Cry of the River Otter! Ic-yang!

Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

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Set in rural Devon and written in 1928, this is the life story of Tarka, the river otter, written as an unsentimental biography, from birth to death.  Williamson had an unusual talent of presenting the life of a wild creature just as is.  Well, there are some names, but that is only so that one can distinguish one creature from another.  Otherwise, they are very much not anthropomorphized.   The language, though, is a delight.  It’s not written in a dialect, per se, but rather […]

Damn, son. Be sure to hang on to that candelabra, though.

Malicroix by Henri Bosco

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What a wild ride.  Gothic mysticism is the best way to describe it, I guess.  Although I was unfamiliar with the French writer, he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times, so there’s that. The book opens in a straightforward way with a pleasant young man being summoned to the estate of his recently deceased great-uncle.  He is dropped off by carriage in a desolate expanse of fields and wetlands where he is met by a taciturn shepherd sent to escort […]

Buzz buzz and swarm away

Beehive by Jorey Hurley

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At first, I did not like Beehive. It is a larger picture book with just one word (swarm; keep, etc) per page. It is not until the end and the authors note that you actually get “something” that is solid. This tells you why the words that were used are important to bees. This is a page of facts and information that finally make this book more than what should be in a board book. Jorey Hurley’s book most likely will help with sight words […]

What’s the name of that song?

The Music of Life by Louis Thomas

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Picture books are fun. You can read a book and finish it in a few minutes. You can feel like you accomplished something. You can learn things that you would not necessarily have been exposed to, because it is a “tough subject” but when it is “summarized” to be accessible to a younger crowd you can say, “OH NOW I get it…” (I am looking at you School House Rock. Okay that is a TV show, but the same concept.) But with The Music of […]

We are no more than shadows flickering briefly on the moors. But the flickering is beautiful.

A Black Fox Running by Brian Carter

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A Black Fox Running is not the type of book I would normally pick up for myself, so I’m glad that this was bought for me as it’s a really beautiful book in so many ways. Kind of a more grown up Watership Down but for foxes, Wulfgar is the titular black wolf whose trials and tribulations we follow. Set on Dartmoor and bringing in the voices of the other animals as well as the humans who inhabit the moor, it’s a great example of […]

Making me feel glad to feel the wind on my face

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

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It seems that the things I’m most fascinated by are those that also frighten me the most. Afraid of the deep sea, I’ll spend months reading about naval horrors, devour tales of explorers (whether they survived or not) while also preferring to not really leave my house, and frequently consider booking a trip through the Paris Catacombs despite being somewhat claustrophobic with a face-clawing terror of actually being underground. Perhaps that’s why I found this book so deeply interesting – an exploration of places I […]



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