Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About blauracke

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Loves books. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: blauracke's Quick Questions interview.)

blauracke's Reviews:

Through the Distorting Mirror

The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr

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A Roman stranger comes to the town of Tomi on the coast of the Black Sea in search of the poet Ovid, who was exiled there by the runaway bureaucracy of an oppressive Roman Empire. What he finds instead is fantasy turned reality, bizarreness, and mysteries. Ransmayr takes parts of Ovid’s life story and elements of his most famous work, the Metamorphoses, and crafts them into something new: he adapts the tales, the protagonists and really the whole environment to fit a new narrative. When […]

When Opposites Attract…

Portrait of a Marriage by Pearl S. Buck

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At the end of the 19th century, William, a young painter who comes from a very wealthy family, falls in love with illiterate farm girl Ruth. Although they could not be more different and William’s parents disapprove strongly, they marry and later settle down on the farm with Ruth’s parents. The book then follows them over the next decades and closely examines the nature of their relationship. The premise is that they are vastly different people, but they are happy nonetheless because they love each […]

Thor’s Grand Adventure

Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

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In 1947, scientist Thor Heyerdahl and five other explorers sailed from Peru to Polynesia 4,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean on a balsa log raft in order to prove that it was possible that Polynesia was settled by a pre-Columbian people travelling the same way. The prevalent scientific opinion at that time was that it had been settled from the west, but Heyerdahl was convinced that he was right and built the raft only with materials that this ancient culture would have also used and […]

Not All Press is Good Press

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

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A young woman’s reputation is destroyed by a journalist working for a tabloid newspaper after she is questioned by the police about her connection to a wanted criminal. Not only is she subsequently threatened through anonymous telephone calls and letters, but her family and acquaintances are also dragged into the affair by the newspaper. Böll wrote this book in the 70s because he was angry at a certain German tabloid that was and is notorious for its inaccurate and sensationalist reporting and that does not […]

The Last Woman on Earth

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

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One morning an ordinary middle-aged woman wakes up in a hunting lodge in the mountains and finds an unsurmountable but transparent wall separating her from the rest of the world. Every living being on the other side of the wall has apparently died and the woman seems to be the last surviving human. Hence begins her struggle to continue on her own, with only a cat, a cow, and a dog for company and support. It is never explained why the wall appeared and what […]

You can’t escape your own nature.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

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After Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby to a sailor while inebriated, he regrets it deeply. A thorough search for them proves futile, so he swears to abstain from alcohol for the next 21 years and settles in Casterbridge, where he becomes a respected and wealthy citizen. 18 years later his wife and daughter come to the same town looking for him and Henchard’s downfall takes its course. The storyline is nothing special here, it essentially reads like a soap opera. Almost every character […]



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