Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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No one had ever told them that at the end there was a choice and it is not the dying who make it.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan

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CBR14 BINGO: Bird square (Full disclosure: this book is not about birds. In my defense of this square filler, the book’s blurb mentions orange-bellied parrots. Parrots do appear in the story, albeit briefly, and I’m counting it because I had to read this book and I want credit for it.) Did you ever read a book that you knew would be considered a masterpiece by a lot of people, could even understand why people would think that and still find the reading of it not worth […]

Of Lice and Men

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

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Nothing endures. Don’t you see, Bonox? That’s what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.  On the face of it, the plot of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about war: […]

All this was in the days when the world was wide, and the island of Tasmania was still the world.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

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This is the 2014 Booker Prize winner, and one of the first books I paid attention to through the process of the award. Most years I’ve either missed it or looked back on it. It has seemed through that process and through my reading to be a very suitable winner both for that year and in general. It’s a good novel, and it’s a really powerful reading experience in a lot of ways. It is not inspiring, uplifting, invigorating, or any of the other kinds […]

An ironic question and a sweeping time period

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I read Richard Flanagan’s most excellent Booker winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, last December, and I wanted to read more of his works. I have not read a lot of literature from ANZAC (that is, Australia-New Zealand Commonwealth), so I am interested in seeing what is out there. The Sound of One Hand Clapping takes place in Tasmania and features themes of immigration and identity, so I was curious to see how it compared to other works. The Sound of One Hand […]

A Booker Winner that doesn’t disappoint

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Every year, I try to keep up with the major book prize winners. I have not cracked open any of the Pulitzer or National Book Award winners recently (but The Goldfinch is on my list, I swear!), but I’ve done okay with the Man Booker Prize winners (and I don’t get any chance to read most of the finalists–time is not on my side, sadly). I read 2013’s winner The Luminaries this year and loved it. So when this year’s winner was also an ANZAC […]



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