Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.”

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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I wanted to love this novel. I fully expected to love this novel. At times, I verged on loving this novel. But then, as I got further into it and closer to the end, I gave up the fight. I simply did not like it. I’ve spent the last week pondering why Normal People didn’t work for me. I don’t object to stories about dysfunctional people, and I certainly don’t require a happy ending. But when a novel bums me out, I want it to […]

Not For Me

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

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Best for: Fans of Sally Rooney’s books. In a nutshell: Eileen and Simon have known each other since they were little. Alice and Eileen have been friends since university. Eileen and Felix have just met. Events transpire. Worth quoting: “I think I have by now forgotten how to conduct social intercourse. I dread to imagine what kind of faces I was making, in my efforts to seem like the kind of person who regularly interacts with others.” Why I chose it: This was in a […]

oh Sally, I don’t know about this one

Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney

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At times transcendent, but at others cringe-worthy. In Beautiful World, Where Are You Sally Rooney crawls so far into her own butthole that she manages to shout out of her mouth “do not look at my talking butthole! You don’t know me!”- and once in a while she says something so beautiful that you wind up saying “thank you so much, butthole!”. Reading this book was a journey, to say the least. Originally, I picked it up on Pub Day and tore right in; I adored Normal […]

No, I think you’re highly intelligent. It’s not lucky for you, in a lot of ways. If you were a little bit stupider you might have an easier life.

Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney

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CBR13 BINGO: Reader’s Choice (in the New Series Square) BINGO! Book Club Square to Machinery Square I don’t think that I have ever had this much of a love/hate reaction to a book. Truly. Everything that I loved about Rooney’s Normal People is here. All of the awkwardness and raw emotion. Everything that I really didn’t like about Conversations with Friends is here too. All of the self indulgent naval gazing histrionics. Ugh. The plot is not complex even if the characters think that they are. The entire story revolves around four […]

Not-so-Normal People

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

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Beautiful World, Where Are You (which should really have a question mark at the end, if you ask me) is being hyped up as the must-read book of the Fall. Sally Rooney’s first two novels were both big hits, with Normal People going on to be adapted into a massively successful TV series. (The adaptation of her first novel, Conversations With Friends, will be released next year.) Rooney herself is an unlikely superstar. The self-professed Marxist seems uncomfortable with fame and ambivalent about the financial […]

Normal People

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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This was another book gifted to me by my cousin Kelsi, she always seems to know which things I’ll like and this was no exception. As a mental health practitioner, I really appreciated all of the discussion about mental health in this book. Each character’s mental health was explored and the background was examined as well. I think it’s super important for young people to explore this in themselves and I found myself taking stock of my own mental wellness and charting my own depression […]



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