Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


A ghost story from the olden days

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

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This period thriller is from 1898 and is about a governess who is hired by a man to care for his niece and nephew. The governess begins the job with excitement, but soon experiences disturbing events and believes ghosts of deceased employees are coming for the kids. This novella was adapted from serial installments in the magazine Collier’s Weekly. It was interesting to read a ghost story from over 100 years ago and see how similar it is to modern-day ghost stories, but in a […]

“I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.”

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

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Even though after reading Henry James in school several times and then declaring him my nemesis, for he is the master triumphant of the never-ending sentence, and saying I would never read from him again, I could not then resist the pull of an audiobook narrated by Emma Thompson, and indeed I am glad I did not do so. Phewf, done with that nonsense. That is what it is like to read Henry James. The first paragraph in The Wings of the Dove nearly killed […]

Henry James would not have understood what a smart house is.

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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I read the first third of this in my paperback copy, then switched over to the audio to see if I could jump start my interest in it again. It worked! For a while, at least. It helped me get through the book, anyway. I liked the audio version better. I was super into this book at first, but as soon as the main character reached the house in the country, something about it lost me. It probably also didn’t help that I was traveling […]

Read Harder Challenge 2018 Complete! Final Cannonball 10 Review!

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

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Sneaking in with a bit to spare, on a borrowed computer, and one book behind last year’s pace I’m finally posting my last review of Cannonball Read 10. This was the Read Harder 2018 task I was looking least forward to, and I managed to push it off until the last possible moment, but at least I am completing the challenge this year. Task 24 was to “read an assigned book you hated (or never finished)”. In reality I have very few books that I […]

I don’t think it’s aged all that well (Plus, half Cannonball!)

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I’ve heard James’ The Turn of the Screw as being a classic Gothic novel, the one that basically begat a genre and inspired authors like Shirley Jackson (whose books I’ve loved so far in my readings). I chose this one for the ‘This Old Thing’ bingo square (it was published in 1898), and I was really excited to finally sit down and read it Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The plot is about a young governess who takes a posting that’s too good to be true in an […]



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