Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

by Leave a Comment

CBR11Bingo – History Schmistory This is a wonderful and strange novel in which a biography is tracing the history of a young courtier in Elizabethan England who both makes his way into the future (present in the book) though time, and also becomes a woman in her 30s by the end. I don’t know if I have a lot more to add to the conversations surrounding this book in terms of adding useful discourse. I am no Virginia Woolf scholar or have spent enough time […]

But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

by Leave a Comment

This novel takes place over the course of a single day as a long married couple plans an afternoon event, while the wife hopes to help fend off an alluring woman who seems interested in her husband. This is Virginia Woolf’s last completed novel, which she finished in a final draft form a few weeks before she died in 1941, at least according to the brief forward by Leonard Woolf. This book has an interesting and very light touch, compared other of her work (Orlando, […]

What we have to do now, then, Sir, is to lay your request before the daughters of educated men and to ask them to help you to prevent war

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

by Leave a Comment

This has been an incredibly crappy week when it comes to thinking through a lot of the issues discussed in this book applied to contemporary society and recent news. I live in Virginia, and well, I KNOW, right? A poorly worded and meekly defended, but good bill that strengthens the privacy rights of women through their healthcare is being used in entirely bad faith and evil discussions to score cheap political points. And so looking at this book, it’s interesting to think through Virginia Woolf’s […]

as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

by 1 Comment

The problem with my local library is I go in for one book and then see ten others I’ve been intending to read, and then they let me have them for free. And so I finally got around to reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf.   The actual plot is pretty well known, and it turns out I could have summarised it before reading the novel itself: Orlando is an Elizabethan nobleman who suffers disappointments as both a lover and a writer. He leaves England for […]

So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches…

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

by 1 Comment

So I am going to spoil this novel about part way through the review, and I will indicate that it’s coming, so be forewarned. This is Virginia Woolf’s third novel, and according to my looking into it, this one forms a kind of departure in style. I haven’t read The Voyage Out or Night and Day, her first two novels, but I have read her next two novels after this one, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and given those two, it surprises me not that this book situates in a kind […]

Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous

by 1 Comment

A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf is a short, classic, feminist treatise, and it was on my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40. I know very little about Virginia Woolf. I vaguely remember having to read Mrs. Dalloway in school, but I think I was too young to really appreciate it. I never even saw The Hours with Nicole Kidman. So, I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I began reading this book. A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo