Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

CBR15 Passport! Book #1 – A book that is Not For Moi.

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

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Oof, this was not for me. Like, so not for me that I maybe shouldn’t even be writing a review, because my brain just bounced off this after about ten pages and then just kept bouncing harder and harder. This is a speculative fiction, experimental novel by British poet Salena Godden about an anthropomorphized version of Death (here called Mrs. Death, personified by an older Black woman) and her connections to/conversations with a person called Wolf. In addition to the the prose actually feeling like […]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]

Problem play indeed.

Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare

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I will be honest with you here, and let you know that I barely remember this play. There were only a handful of Shakespeare’s plays that I made it out of school not having read, and this was one of them. I’ve been meaning to read it for years but never seemed to get around to it. Honestly, I wish I hadn’t read it, because at least there was a pleasing sense of mystery to it, with me wondering what it was about and only […]

You can change your mind, that’s a what a mind is for.

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This review isn’t going to do the book justice since I finished it over a month ago. Probably more. I don’t even want to look. One thing I will say right away is that this is one of the few instances where I actually enjoyed the filmed version better than the book. I don’t have any real evidence to back this up since my memory is crap, but all I remember is a feeling that I liked the slight tilt the show put on this […]

My least favorite of the series, but still worth reading, if you liked the first three.

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“Did you know,” said Patrick, addressing Seamus again, “that among the caribou herdsmen of Lapland, the top shaman gets to drink the urine of the reindeer that has eaten the magic mushrooms, and his assistant drinks the urine of the top shaman, and so on, all the way down to the lowest of the low who scramble in the snow, pleading for a splash of twelfth-generation caribou piss?” “I didn’t know that,” said Seamus flatly. “I thought it was your special field,” said Patrick, surprised. “Anyhow, […]

“How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought . . .” #CBRBingo

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“Everything was under control. No, he mustn’t think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. […]



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