Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Lackluster Career Advice

Safe and Effective Practice by Jean Cote

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My home is cluttered with career advice books that I didn’t ask for but which it was strongly implied that I should read.  Because these two were shorter books, I’m pairing them together in a single review: Safe and Effective Practice by Jean Cote: Lawyering is easy says an old white man. Ah, hindsight, that vaunted mountaintop that the experienced get to judge the rest of us from.  Jean Cote was previously a judge on Alberta’s Court of Appeal, the highest court in the province, […]

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” (CBR11 Bingo)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Rosamund Pike (narrator)

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I have absolutely no idea how to review this book. Instead, I’ll tell you the story of my relationship with it. In my sophomore year of high school we read Austen for the first time. I clearly remember our teacher (looking back he was young, with long hair) stalking around the room selling us on an author only some of us had heard of, and attempting to inspire in us the mental fortitude it takes a 15 or 16 year old to really battle with […]

Good Language is Wasted on the Young: Bingo 6 (because I missed one)

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

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I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for the first time in 5th grade for a class assignment, and never revisited it again. However, my interest in the original tale was piqued when hubby and I took a trip to actual Sleepy Hollow, New York, for their Halloween festivities a few weeks ago. We saw a storyteller do the entire legend complete with props, costumes, and the original language. It was AWESOME, but I wondered while we were listening how much of the story was truncated […]

Just as great as 9th grade.

Cue For Treason by Geoffrey Trease

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CBR11 Bingo – Back to School I read this book in my first semester of high school, in my 9th grade English class. All I really remembered was that it was set in Shakespearian England, and that I really liked it.  I apparently liked it so much that the copy on my bookshelf is my actual high school copy.  I wasn’t really the thieving type, and I don’t really remember why I didn’t have to return it at the end of the semester, but regardless, […]

And exhausted is my patience. (back to school, bingo)

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I was hoping that re-reading this might make me more apt to like it; after all, it’s been eleven years since I graduated college and this is seen as one of Fitzgerald’s masterworks. But yeah, after MeToo there is no WAY I’m feeling anything resembling sympathy for Dick Diver, the worst psychiatrist in history.  There’s actually a line in flashback where Dick states his aspiration to be the world’s best psychiatrist and his partner thinks he’s joking and laughs; I laughed too because HE MARRIES […]

Now I Am Medea; My Wit Has Grown Through Suffering.

Medea by Christa Wolf

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This is a retelling of the myth of Medea, with her depiction differing greatly from most others, in that she is not a jealous mad woman that does not even shrink back from killing her own children to get revenge, but a proud outsider who gets caught up in a political battle and is made the scapegoat for any evil that befalls the city of Corinth. In my last year of secondary school, I read this as one of a few adaptations of the myth […]



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