Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

“She had lifted me to her star…”

Olivia by Dorothy Strachey

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Welcome to a small world in which “a world in which everything was fierce and piercing, everything charged with strange emotions, clothed with extraordinary mysteries, and in which I myself seemed to exist only as an inner core of palpitating fire.” Isn’t that a place you want to go? I happened across this slim novella by chance in the classics section of a nearby indie bookstore. The author’s surname caught my eye, and I did a quick search to see if she was related to […]

“Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest”

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

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I’m really interested in the Bloomsbury Group (that intellectual crowd from the 1910s-1920s that included E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf), and so of course I’d come across multiple references to Lytton Strachey and his book Eminent Victorians, which so many literary scholars say was foundational to changing how people wrote biographies, and yet which I almost never see quoted or discussed at any kind of length at this point. Since I’m thinking of teaching on the Bloomsbury Group sometime soon, I decided I should investigate the […]

Saying goodbye to a favorite poet

The Historians by Eavan Boland

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I first encountered Eavan Boland’s poetry during my junior year study-abroad in Scotland. I did a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature that was, quite frankly, pretty damn formative, and when we got to Eavan Boland, I was hooked. She wrote with such candor about the experience of being a woman, and a woman poet, and about being an Irish woman poet, and the struggles of finding her place in a tradition where women were almost always the subjects of poems, not the creators. […]

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice”

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

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There’s always classics I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten to yet, and summers are in part a chance to chip away at that long, long list (so many books! so little time). E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View was the latest to be ticked off the list, and it’s a nice one to get around to. Forster’s second novel, after Where Angels Fear to Tread, it’s a brisk, breezy, Austenesque volume that comes in under 200 pages: quick, spritely, and while it clearly […]

“And if I speak of Paradise”

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

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A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson’s fourth poetry collection, didn’t come across my radar until it won the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. While literary prize culture is as fallible as, say, film awards like the Oscars, the TSE Prize shortlist is always interesting to look at, and the title poem immediately caught my interest. Unfortunately, it was incredibly hard to get my hands on a copy! Robinson’s publisher, Peepal Tree Press, is a small independent press, and it seems like demand for the […]

“History is storytelling”

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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This was a novel I had wanted to read when it was first published in 2016. Of course, that year was the year of a dissertation defense and a cross-country move and a new job, so by the time I had a chance to breathe, Homegoing had slipped down my list, supplanted by other novels. But then I received Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi’s sophomore novel, in a book subscription box, and I felt like maybe, just maybe, I ought to read her debut before tackling this new one. […]



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