Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Trees are the Best

The Overstory by Richard Powers

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Richard Power’s novel The Overstory is organized as a tree: roots, trunk, crown and seeds. The roots are eight individual short stories of immigrants coming to this continent, families planting trees, a man’s life saved by a tree, a boy falling out of a tree. The stories are unconnected and even the trees don’t hint at how they may or may not be drawn together.  For this reason, the trunk of the story is a bit difficult to read initially because five of the characters […]

A long apprenticeship for this final act of bad judgment

Orfeo by Richard Powers

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CBR BINGO: Awards (2014 California Book Awards Silver Medal Fiction/ Man Booker long list) Somehow I managed not to get the memo regarding Richard Powers earlier in his career. I picked up “Overstory” last year because it was displayed at the library, had trees on the cover and looked like it checked all of my eco-fiction boxes. (I’m still wondering what to call the nature/environmental/ecology centric fiction that I love. Is there an established understood category for this? Anyone?) Didn’t realize I was picking up the […]

Tell yourself its fiction and you’ll feel better

The Overstory by Richard Powers

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This book took me by complete surprise. To start with, the first third or so is effectively a series of maybe-kind-of-if-you-squint linked short stories – and I loved them. I’ve written time and time again here how I’m not really a short story person but this part of the book changed me. They were just gorgeous. I loved the tree theme that carried through and how it was different and unique and beautiful to each and I was telling absolutely everyone how good it was […]

And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning

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CBR10 BINGO: So Shiny! I have been sitting on this review for a while. It is always more difficult for me to write reviews for books that really move me. This is a meaty book full of WORDS and IDEAS and large number of characters with story lines that need to be followed.  I would classify this in what I think of as “epic”. It is deeply character driven and  I was instantly invested in the characters. If an author can get me to do […]

English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide.

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This is a very good novel about trees. It sticks to its subject a little too on the nose at times, meaning every once in awhile when it comes back to trees, it feels a little forced, but for the most part, that’s what a novel is. I went into the novel with a few bits of prior knowlege: a) it’s about trees b) Richard Powers tends to write what I call scientific fiction, which is related to science fiction in that it levies in […]



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