Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Probably Don’t Start with book 5 in this series

Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson

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Who am I kidding? If you read the first four Mistborn novels, you’re likely going to read this one. If you didn’t, well, I don’t know what to tell you.   It’s not that Brandon Sanderson novels are without teeth, but he’s almost goofily squeamish about sex and sexuality. They tend to have some interesting ideas about religion and faith, have good action, a reliably interesting and intricate magic/abilities systems, and he’s good at embedding genre fiction into his genre fiction. His political writing is […]

Nabokov by way of Evelyn Waugh?

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

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So you know how you were saying you wanted to read soap operas written by philosophers? Ok, but still, you should. She wrote 26 or so novels from 1956-1995. A few years after her last novel, she died of Alzheimer’s, the story of which you can see in the movie Iris.   Iris Murdoch was a trained philosopher who didn’t start writing until her 30s. She is also concerned with some strange ideas and topics in her novels. For example, when you pick up one […]

Jaysus

The Comittments by Roddy Doyle

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Did you like Sing Street? Did you find to be a little too washed over and sanitary? Is that a crazy sentence when I type it? Maybe this book is for you? When I was a kid, we had some movie we bought on VHS that had a trailer for this movie. I am a little too young to have watched it then, and for some reason, twenty-five years later I picked it up and read it straight through. So an Irish dude about town […]

Story of a Life, kind of

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

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This novel won the Pulitzer in 1995. The author is Canadian. My poetry professor in college recommended me this book 15 years ago. That’s everything I knew about this novel going in. It’s a good novel. It really is. It’s kind of a novel’s novel. What I mean by this is that it focuses on the small events of a family’s lifespan. It involves multiple narrative techniques. It has themes. It has some pictures. It has some humor, some weirdness, and it’s a little over 300 […]

So Many Babies: Kristin Lavransdatter part II

The Wife by Sigrid Undset

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I previously reviewed the first book of this trilogy by Sigird Undset, here: https://everyday-offershub.com/2017/01/its-like-game-of-thrones-but-without-all-the-violence-and-scheming-and-a-lot-more-jesus/   If the first book deals with the innocence of childhood giving way to the folly of youth and young love, this book brings home the reality and consequences of choices. We find Kristin married, away from her homeland, and now head of a large estate. She and her husband have moved past what was an interminably long courtship (where whatever kind of honeymoon they were ever going to has transpired and […]

Parts Better than the Whole, for sure

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Adichie

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This is my third Chimamanda Adichie book. Previously I have read Purple Hibiscus and Americanah. In both previous books, I enjoyed the richness of language and the careful, detailed narration. I think I also must have enjoyed the relatively long gap between reading them, because having read Americanah not that long ago sort of soured this book a little. In part, this was souring because one of the stories traces some of the specific plot from that book or closely enough borrows the narration that […]



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