Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“I think I saw our ghosts”: a devastating modern WWI novel

Regeneration by Pat Barker

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Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was one of my favorite novels of 2018; I read it after teaching The Iliad for the first time, fascinated by the idea of a novel that told the events of the epic primarily from a feminine point of view: namely, that of Briseis, the Trojan captive that Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over. It was also my first introduction to Pat Barker in general, and was I ever appreciative of that when I learned that Barker had also written a […]

Not just another WWI novel

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#cbr10bingo And So It Begins Pat Barker’s Booker-nominated first volume of the Regeneration Trilogy takes place during World War I and, unsurprisingly, deals with the trauma and horror of that conflict. What sets her work apart from other WWI novels, however, is that the action takes place not at the front but at an asylum for British soldiers suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Many of the characters in Regeneration are real people who really knew each other in London and at Craiglockhart […]

A View of WWI England’s Homefront

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This is one of those books where I get why it’s acclaimed and award winning, but I didn’t really enjoy it that much.  Granted, I’m not sure if these novels are meant to be enjoyed since I would definitely classify them in that literary fiction category that’s more about teaching than enjoying.  However, even within that, I can’t say the novel particularly moved me.  I thought it was dark and oppressive but in a way that actually turned me off from the novel.  It isn’t […]



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