Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Aimless Dud

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl

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In my review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was excited to re-read the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl. I haven’t read the sequel since I was a kid, so I was hoping it was as magical as the first book. It was not. There are basically three sections to the book. In the first section, Charlie, Willy Wonka, and Charlie’s family rocket to outer space in the chocolate factory’s glass elevator, not that that was their initial plan. […]

Still Holds Up (Now with Less Racism)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

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Roald Dahl was an awful, awful person. He was wildly antisemitic, racist, and so disagreeable one of his wives called him “Roald the Rotten.” He’s a classic case of “separate the artist from the art,” because his whimsical, captivating (but always with a dark side) books seem to bely his misanthropic personality. I thought about this the whole time I was reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie is a sweet, good little boy who lives in abject poverty with his parents and four grandparents. […]

Do People Who Ban Books Even Read Them?

James & the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

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This book was in the “Banned Books” display at my library, so I picked it up on my way to the check-out counter. The last time I read James and the Giant Peach, I think I may have been in the 4th grade, so this was really like reading it for the first time. As an adult, I have to say the descriptions of the child abuse inflicted on James by his aunts was really disturbing, so I was shocked to find out that’s not why […]

Longs and Shorts

The Big Book of Reel Murders by Ed. Otto Penzler

My Head! My Head! by Robert Graves

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Heart by Jade Anouka

Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch

The Ophelia Network by Mur Lafferty

Deep Hole by Don Winslow

Legal Immigrant by Alan Cumming

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

The Cube by Adam Rapp

Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Pale Sister by Colm Toibin

Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The Big Book of Reel Murders – Edited by Otto Penzler – 4/5 The concept of this collection is still mostly pulpy stories (though with some other older stories and more contemporary stories not really pulpy) that were made into films. It should really be called “Reel Crimes” as not every story involves a murder, but the concept mostly works. It ends up being a little frayed throughout as apparently it’s just much easier to get some rights to stories than others, so like the […]

Its Time for Me to Say Goodbye to Dahl

The Witches by Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake (Illustrator)

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Roald Dahl was one of the authors who dominated my childhood reading which makes sense as he is one of the most celebrated children’s authors of the 20th century. I spent a lot of time deep in a few of his books, seeing bits of myself in his protagonists. But this is my goodbye to him. Dahl was an unrepentant bigot. He was profoundly anti-Semitic, perpetuating harmful tropes and falsehoods for years in his public statements and books. Dahl is also easily read as a […]

Mixed Bag of Mixed Bags

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

Steel and Other Stories by Richard Matheson

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Going Solo by Roald Dahl

Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein

V2 by Robert Harris

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The Wordy Shipmates – 4/5 Stars I wonder how many people know that if you’re from parts of the country, you’re basically not taught about the Puritans at all. You get the same kind of education that Sarah Vowell talks about early in this book with discussions about “the first Thanksgiving” and plenty of other oblique, but not entirely in depth look into the early colonialization of New England. In the South, you’re mostly taught about Jamestown, or your own respective colony (if you had […]



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