Claire Badger – Page 4 – Cannonball Read 17

You don’t have to be grateful for sex

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

August 11, 2020 by Claire Badger Leave a Comment

I needed to read some essays. I needed those essays to be written by someone very different from me in life and circumstances, but ultimately kind of the same as me in mindset and attitude. Thus I found Sam Irby, and because the book has a picture of a kitty on it, I pulled it off the shelf, opened to a random page, laughed my ass off in the store, and bought it. Irby is the queen of I don’t give a fuck this is […]

Dispatches from the past

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

August 11, 2020 by Claire Badger 1 Comment

I can’t remember how I came across Fromm’s seminal treatise, The Art of Loving, but it was in mid-April, when I was trying to figure out how to make sense of an exceptionally narcissistic individual and how he’d turned my life upside down. I read a chapter, and while it resonated and struck me as vital, I couldn’t put it into the framework of what I was coping with, so I put it down for three months as I worked through a lot of that. […]

Washed Over

Asymmetry by Lisa Hallifay

June 11, 2020 by Claire Badger Leave a Comment

Sometimes, books have “reading group” questions at the back, and most of the time, I don’t know about these sections until I get to the back of the book. This is one of those books where I wish I’d read the questions before going into it. They’re a little spoilery, but they would have given my brain something better to chew on than the things it did chew on while I tried to figure out this book. I would say it’s a good book, well […]

A Welcome Addition To YA Dystopias

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

May 27, 2020 by Claire Badger 2 Comments

Were we all a little burned out on dystopic YA fiction for a while there? Yeah, and the movie studios sure didn’t help. Yet here in 2020, something about a pandemic has made dystopic fiction that is specifically YA a lot more appealing though, so who better to reignite my interest in the genre than Susanne Collins herself? Did I get so obsessively into the Hunger Games trilogy back in ’12 that I neglected to finish my Masters thesis on time and had to take […]

A glistening doorknob without a door

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

November 19, 2019 by Claire Badger Leave a Comment

I picked up this book because I wanted something atmospheric. When daylight savings hits and I stop experiencing sunlight I get into these funks and all I want is deep base and prose the blurs the line between poetry and description, and narratives that aren’t but could be. I found this book on a list of books similar to Annihilation, so if you liked the atmosphere woven through that story, and want something with even less coherent narrative, this is it. You’ve found that weird […]

Came for the cover art; stayed for the story

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

October 14, 2019 by Claire Badger Leave a Comment

I’ve confessed before that I have a habit of buying books based on their covers. I totally bought this book based on the cover. I read the summary and I was like “hm.. it’s probably YA” and I don’t tend to buy YA these days, but then I said “I don’t care- that cover art!” So, it is YA, and like the cover, it’s very, very good YA. I’d say it wears it’s inspiration from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation trilogy proudly, and does a lot of […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

About Claire Badger