Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An Early Work by Dostoevsky

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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If you’re interested in reading classic literature, this is a good one to start with. Clocking in at under 70 pages (as least according to my Kindle), this novella is told as the diary of an unnamed narrator recounting a few nights with a young woman in Petersburg. Our narrator meets Nastenka on a street one night after rescuing her from a man who was accosting her. He had previously observed her on the bank of a river and noticed her crying, but she ran […]

Who knew a book with “bleak” in the title could be so much fun? (with helpful charts!)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

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Bleak House has been brooding on my TBR list for years because, even though I’m a long-time Dickens fan, I was intimidated by the length and by what I perceived would be a weighty novel. I’m ecstatic that I overcame my hesitance, because this novel was more fun than a mariachi band on a roller coaster. Sure, about 9 people die, but you can’t make gruel without smashing a few oats, right? There are so many characters that the death toll amounts to maybe 12%, and […]

“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 […]

Too much damage

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

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Osamu Dazai is an esteemed author of classical Japanese literature, but he was a troubled man in real life.  Like a lot of classical Western authors, he squandered his money on alcohol and prostitutes, and ultimately, died by suicide at a relatively young age.  The tortured genius thing is not just a Western trope, I guess. This book, his last before his death, is purported to be fiction, but is almost biographical in how the beats of the story reflect his real life.  So maybe […]

Considering Winnie the Pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

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Bingo Review 23: Roaring 20s I didn’t feel like a lot of drama right now; calm reading is good right now for me. So what to do for this square? Like a lot of people, I suspect, I know who-what Winnie-the-Pooh is, but I can’t remember ever having read any of the original stories, the first volume of which came out in 1926. I feel like I must have, but upon picking up that first volume of stories, Winnie-the-Pooh, they weren’t too familiar seeming; unless […]

Victor Frankenstein asks Reddit: AITA?

Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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r/AmItheAsshole * Posted by u/doomedbyfate 1 hour ago AITA for bringing a creature to life and then abandoning him, resulting in him vowing revenge and murdering a bunch of people? I (20ish M) grew up in Geneva. My mother died when I was young, and her greatest wish was for me to marry Elizabeth, my adopted “cousin.” When I went off to college to study sciences, I discovered the secret to bestowing life. I can’t tell you how I did it, and when you read […]



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