Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

End of Year School Project Round Up

The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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As an end of year project happening during AP exams week(s), I assigned my American lit students to do some groupwork on short stories of the 19th century. Part of the assignment was to link the stories to one of the dominant American themes we’ve been using this quarter. The themes are not meant to be exhaustive, don’t apply to every piece of American literature, and you can still read something that none of the themes easily applies to. We also used the themes are […]

Grab Bag

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascensia

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

Mountain by Cixin Liu

The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakmi

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson

Homecoming by Eddie Huang

The Matchlock Rifle by Walter Edmonds

Two Logs Crossing by Walter Edmonds

Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

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Mortality – 4/5 Stars This is a partial memoir and final notes first published by Vanity Fair and then in book form from the final days of Christopher Hitchens. There’s a part in the middle of every thing where someone tells Hitchens something like “God works in mysterious ways” and Hitchens wonders what is so mysterious about a heavy smoker getting advanced lung cancer. That’s the basic idea here. First things first, it’s not secret that Hitchens is a bit of a bugbear, and for […]

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in a marriage.”

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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CBR12 BINGO: Yellow Square I’m finding the random color square bingo row pretty delightful. Since I don’t have many titles on my TBR pile that fit the bill, I started Googling around to find titles that fit the colors. The yellow search yielded an interesting little bit of feminist short fiction published in 1891. Perkins Gilman puts a fictional spin on her experiences with the “bed rest cure” that doctors of the time prescribed for women suffering from “nervous” conditions. In her introduction, she notes […]

Short story review dump (Part II)

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Little Man by Michael Cunningham

Escape from New York by Zadie Smith

Alan Bean Plus Four by Tom Hanks

Miss Marple Tells a Story by Agatha Christie

Accident by Agatha Christie

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (5 stars) Published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a woman, the narrator, suffering from depression. The treatment imposed on her by her husband is bed rest, and she is largely confined to a room with Yellow Wallpaper. Instead of easing her turmoil, deeper psychological issues manifest, and she is eventually driven mad by the confinement. This is an utterly haunting depiction of mental illness compounded by a deeply patriarchal society that sought to protect […]

They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.

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Mary Beard describes the opening of this novel, and because of that I decided to read it. Phew…first off, beware the audiobooks of this one. It’s a public domain book and even though it wasn’t presented as a Librivox production, my edition had like five different narrators, and it was rough going. Anyway, this is a funny book. It’s presented as an adventure novel ala Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, or even the parodied films in UP. It’s about three […]



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