Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Not great, but not awful

Saving Juliet by Suzanne Selfors

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Mimi is a reluctant actress, forced into the profession by her mother to continue in her family legacy.  Mimi would rather go to med school, but her controlling mother will hear none of it. It doesn’t matter that Mimi has stage fright.  Her current torture is playing Juliet in her family’s theater. Troy is a self-centered teenage pop star whose agent has decided that taking on the role of Romeo will be good for ratings, despite the fact that he’s not very good at acting. […]

Oh moon, oh stars, You heal the languor of the souls and minds…

Seven Shakespeares, Volume 1 by Harold Sakuishi

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I downloaded this manga on a whim and it really paid off! Seven Shakespeares by Harold Sakuishi has a unique arc – depicting Shakespeare’s Lost Years between 1585 and 1592. As Sakuisi notes, in 1585, “We have a young man (with children) from a small village who had received no education sufficient to be a man of letters…and then we have the greatest poet of the age…” – so what happened? The prologue centers on the enactment of Hamlet and the political powers for and […]

Prospero Atwood

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

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Oh my god.  How was this THIS good? This book shouldn’t have been this good.  The premise sounds insane. A retelling of The Tempest where our Prospero is an exiled theater director setting his own (previously thwarted) adaptation of The Tempest in a corrections facility.  It’s the definition of Should Not Work. Not only does it, it’s one of her best. Atwood intelligently uses meta text throughout the book, which made this (more than the other Hogarth Shakespeare I’ve read so far) feel more like […]

If Your Nerdiest English Professor Wrote A Cookbook

MLA Members Cook by Modern Language Association

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There are two ways to think about this: what’s the nerdiest thing you can think of OR what’s the most in-jokey vanity project you can think of? Either way, the answer is MLA Members Cook!  This is a cookbook supposedly created by collecting recipes from members of the MLA; yes that MLA, as in the formatting and citation style your English teachers and professors made you use. I said ‘supposedly’ created  because based on what this supposed book is presented as, a cookbook by members […]

My Chemical Renaissance

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

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I am an English teacher and, as such, I regularly teach Shakespeare to high schoolers. This is nearly always met with varying degrees of trepidation; even the ones who like literature and who have a good grasp of the English language find his works somewhat daunting and often boring by default. And I get it, I do, but it’s such a shame. Once you get the hang of it and manage to pierce through the – admittedly often dense – language, Shakespeare was an absolute […]

Pain could be measured, whereas love often couldn’t even be located.

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This book is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. I previously reviewed Chevalier’s New Boy from the series. It was a FANTASTIC take on Othello. A year or so ago, I read Atwood’s spin on the Tempest ,  Hag-Seed, but didn’t really care for it.  Dunbar is St. Aubyn’s retelling of King Lear and I’m not sure exactly how I feel about it. My general reaction to most of it was… “What just happened?!” St. Aubyn focuses pretty much exclusively on the dysfunctional family theme here. Henry Dunbar is an 80-year-old  billionaire business mogul who hasn’t exactly […]



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