Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Bits and Pieces Crumbling as I Read

The City of Dreadful Night by Rudyard Kipling

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    cbr18bingo Card repair – because this book is totally beyond that Well this was definitely something different – in more ways than one. I’ve never had a book that actually crumbled in my hands as I read it. I picked it up at a library sale, because it was going for a dollar, and it was Kipling (fond memories of The Jungle Book and Kim) so how could I go wrong? Turns out it was one of his first published books, in 1885, […]

Look for the Bare Necessities! Classic storytelling, talking animals, and a scoop of racism.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

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CBR 14 BINGO: Snake, because snakes figure into multiple stories in this book (Kaa the snake in Mowgli’s stories, and Nag & Nagaina in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”) The Jungle Book has got to be the classic “Love it AND Hate it” book. On the one hand you get classic storytelling by a Nobel-prize winning author and talking animals. On the other hand, you get to feel uncomfortable in a way that only a 19th-Century white man born under the British Raj in India can make you feel. […]

God He knows we need men more and more in the Game.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

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This 1901 novel is the primary central fiction of Rudyard Kipling’s career. He wrote other novels like Captain Courageous, Gunga Din, and obviously The Jungle Book(s), and he was of course quite well known as a poet — famously for “If” and infamously for “The White Man’s Burden.” And he would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature 5 or so years after this was published — the first writer in English to do so. So this novel follows Kim, a boy of […]

Only Enjoyed Mowgli and Rikki Tikki Tavi Stories

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kiplin

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So here’s the thing. I of course have seen the Disney version of The Jungle book cartoon. Also I have seen the cartoon about Rikki Tikki Tavi that used to play I think either on USA Network or Nickelodeon as a kid. I so wanted to live among wolves and buy a mongoose. My mom said nope to both things. So when I read this the other day, I had no idea this version had the Mowgli stories as well as a few others (I […]

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

Aesop's Fables by Aesop

Beowulf by Unknown

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules by David Sedaris

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The whole of this post deals with how we tell stories and who we tell those stories to, and what it means to tell THOSE stories in Those ways. Mostly it’s a handful of audiobook I was listening to this wekeend as I played video games and drove around town.   Aesop’s Fables I teach Aesop’s Fables to students, especially my English 12 (collab/special education) class because it allows us to look very directly for the ways in which we connect the words of the […]

The Art and Poetry of War

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I teach British Literature to 17 and 18 year olds of various levels and degrees of interest (in different classes).  Something that I’ve noticed over the years is that just about all my students feel something when we read World War I poetry. I don’t know if it’s because it’s visceral,  perhaps they appreciate the simple plain language, or maybe they can relate to the poems where the young authors express regret and naivete about their involvement in the war.  Because come on, I remember […]



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