Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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No homo for Brad Pitt

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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Nowhere Book Bingo 25: Reimagining or retelling of a classic CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: History   Patroclus is exiled from his father’s kingdom after he accidentally kills a boy and is sent into fosterage with King Peleus. Here is where he meets Achilles, whose mother is the sea nymph Thetis. Achilles is supposed to become the greatest warrior who ever lived, and trains diligently to achieve this goal. While they are vastly different, Patroclus and Achilles become sworn companions, and Patroclus accompanies Achilles to train […]

Fanfic — Classics Edition

The Song of Achilles: A Novel by Madeline Miller

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Cbr12bingo Gateway BINGO horizontal (Gateway to Shelfie) I first read The Song of Achilles for CBR4, and for me, it is the gateway to a genre that I will call “reimagined classics” or perhaps “fanfic: classics edition.” This is the first book I can remember reading that is based on a classic story, in this case The Iliad, expanding on a part of it and telling it from the perspective of a minor character. Re-imagined classics allow authors to go into more detail on aspects […]

A (not so) funny thing happened on the way to writing this review

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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I was finally caught up with my reviews at the end of March, and then everything went to hell. I spent a week in Paris (yay!) but came home to what I thought was a simple but nasty case of jetlag + airplane cold but which turned out to be . . . THE FLU. And let me just say that jetlag and three days of crazy-loud home repairs and several days of high fever/chills/aches/lungs-filled-with-pure-evil are not conducive to being productive. Moral of the story: […]

I came for the fighting, but stayed for the sweet, sweet love

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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I’m closer to 40 than I am 30, and I’ve never read The Iliad. I did, however, read The Odyssey in middle school, and quite liked it – though poetry has never been my thing, and the archaic formatting of the translation I read bothered me. Still. It was a good story, and I was in the florescence of my love for heroic fantasy, so The Odyssey kind of felt like the genesis for the types of stories I was reading at the time. So […]

Books I Want to Talk About with my Friend, the Classics Professor

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Thanks to all the Cannonball Read folks who raved about Madeline Miller this year.  Because of the accolades, I read The Song of Achilles back in May and Circe in November and both were books that engaged and transported me.  Thanks to my procrastinating ways, I decided to review both books together and because they’ve been reviewed by a lot of folks already, I thought I’d talk more about my experience reading them and spare you the plot summary. I read Song of Achilles on my […]

There is No Law that Gods Must be Fair

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In anticipation of Madeline Miller’s new novel, Circe, being released (it just arrived in the mail!) I decided to do a reread of The Song of Achilles, which was one of my favorite reads from the past couple of years. And I will say, it was just as good the second time around, if not a little more painful in seeing more of the foreshadowing and understanding the deeper meaning of certain lines earlier in the novel before the course of action takes place. Okay, […]



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