Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Compassion

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

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All I could tell you about this book prior to having read it was that it was about racial justice, and was written from the perspective of a girl whose father, Atticus Finch, is one of the most beloved characters in American literature. I’ve seen the movie. Watched it in college some twenty years ago. And while I remember loving the movie, I don’t remember much about it beyond that. Unsurprisingly, the book is pretty damn good. As is the case with many of the […]

No less powerful when reading it 25 year later…

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

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CBR11 Bingo: Banned Books   In trying to decide what to read for the Banned Book square, I considered several options, but landed on re-reading this classic. The first time I read To Kill A Mockingbird was in my Grade 10 English class. I remember being shocked as an adult to hear that it was so often protested, because it was just accepted as a classic in my classroom twenty-five-ish years ago. Maybe a difference between where Canadians and Americans draw their lines in the literary sand? […]

CBR Bingo: Fahrenheit 451

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I’ve been meaning to reread To Kill a Mockingbird for a couple years now; CBR Bingo’s Fahrenheit 451 category was the perfect excuse to finally get around to rereading Harper Lee’s classic. According to the American Library Association To Kill a Mockingbird, which was first published in 1960, was the seventh most banned book in 2017. Most of the bans against Mockingbird come from its use of profanity and racial slurs as well as the adult themes of rape and incest but I think sometimes the most important books are […]

Clueless

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I had a lot of good reasons for not wanting to read this book. Even before all the pearl-clutching reviews came out bemoaning the racism of a beloved character, before the stories that pointed out how we’ve always misunderstood the race component of To Kill a Mockingbird [TKAM] anyway, I suspected that a sequel to a classic novel was bound to disappoint. And the strange circumstances of its publication, after decades of the author and her sister saying it never would be, further dampened any […]

“I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

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Straight up, this is a classic even among classics, and so I’m giving myself permission right up front for this review not to be important or add anything to the conversation at all. I don’t actually think I’m capable of saying anything that hasn’t already been said by people who said it better than I ever could. I feel like the only way this book can be reviewed now is either by looking at it through the context of today’s societal lens, or by relating […]



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