Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: WWI

We’re all so f*cked

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

by 2 Comments

It took me ages to finish this book. Not because I had troubles reading it, the language in this is in fact incredibly fluid, I would even say that German prose hardly gets better than this. It took me so long because the dawning realisation that people don’t change, they don’t ever change, is a lot to bear. The sheer relatability of this upset me to the core and it should reach so many more people. The World of Yesterday is the memoir of Stefan […]

I keep my heart safely between the pages of this book…

Overseas by Beatriz Williams

by 3 Comments

Kate Wilson thinks her life is pretty normal. She just wants to finish her internship at Sterling Bates so she can head off to business school and become a commodities trader in her own right. Enter Julian Lawrence—Sterling Bates client and mysterious billionaire hedgie. Despite a rocky beginning, Julian can’t seem to get enough of Kate. He’s using the L word before they’ve even had their first date. Suddenly her life is anything but normal. The world slides sideways—Kate is fired for alleged insider trading, […]

TFW The Trenches of WWI Beat Life at Oxford, Any Day

Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves

by 4 Comments

Bingo Square Shelfie Good-Bye to All That is rather a “Boy’s Own” version of, Robert Graves’ (the Irish-British poet) account of his public school and war years – WWI, that is.  Schooling started at Charterhouse School and continued at Oxford, and Graves did not enjoy any bit of it.  As soon as the War started, Graves signed up, as an officer, and never looked back.  War, it turned out, was far more his element. Graves was one of the several British poets involved in WWI, […]

“I think I saw our ghosts”: a devastating modern WWI novel

Regeneration by Pat Barker

by 3 Comments

Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was one of my favorite novels of 2018; I read it after teaching The Iliad for the first time, fascinated by the idea of a novel that told the events of the epic primarily from a feminine point of view: namely, that of Briseis, the Trojan captive that Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over. It was also my first introduction to Pat Barker in general, and was I ever appreciative of that when I learned that Barker had also written a […]

cbr12bingo – The Roaring 20s (and two more “bingos”)

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

by 2 Comments

Oh, Hemingway. You dirty old dog. I have a soft-spot for the Lost Generation, and a sentimental attachment to The Sun Also Rises. While plenty of this novel- and his writing in general- has aged poorly, there is still value to be found. Hemingway was plenty of things as both an author and a man, but here I will choose to focus on the story and the broken people within- and the story of my attachment to this book. My first read was back in […]

Lady Spies Rule

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

by Leave a Comment

I grabbed this book during my last in-person visit to the library where I was panic grabbing books to stock up prior to the closure. I’ve been a big fan of Reese’s book club and dove back to the beginning: this was the second of her picks (I had already read and enjoyed her first pick, “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.” This book was interesting but took a lot for me to get through, which I think was a combo of it’s hard to focus […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo