Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I Think That’s Enough Doyle for Me

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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Bingo Square: Back to School I had originally started reading a memoir as my “Back to School” square but despite how much I loved the book in 9th grade, after being barely 18% into the book, I simply couldn’t handle the amount of death and despair.  Given that the book covered 20th century China and it was still in the 1940s, I realized I wasn’t in the right mindset to deal with the amount of suffering that would still come given the famine and the […]

Chap sees an swan in the cinema. He says “are you a swan?” “Yes” comes the answer. “What are you doing here?” “Well, I liked the book”.

Wild Swans by Xanthe Gresham Knight

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#cbr11bingo #Classic You most likely know at least one version of the classic story of Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen; but the illustrations by Charlotte Gastaut are what make this edition, retold by Xanthe Gresham Knight, fresh. Knight’s version of the story has the young princess, Eliza, sent to live with a family in a village that has not been touched by the plague that took her mother. This is after her father remarries and Stepmother knows that to keep her safe, Eliza must […]

The perfect amount of creepy.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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This was a book club pick in an attempt by our group to occasionally dip our toes into the classics. It had been in my TBR pile for a while, but I just hadn’t got to it yet, so being ‘forced’ into it was ok by me! Our heroine is an orphan girl working as a lady’s companion and we meet her as they are travelling abroad. During this trip, she meets the recently widowed Maxim de Winter. Despite his grief and melancholy, she makes […]

“A small creature swallowed whole by a monster…”

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

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“Horror,” Laura Miller says in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House, “turns on the dissolution of boundaries […] between the outside of the body and everything that ought to stay inside.” Maybe the way horror lurks in liminal spaces, only rarely coming right out in the open, has something to do with how much I enjoy the genre. And The Haunting of Hill House serves masterfully as our guide to those cracked and uncertain places.  

It’s official: I ain’t got no cooth

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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I’ve resolved to read more classics this year, and that puts me in a bit of a bind. There simply aren’t as many capital-C Classics by women (which does *not* reflect well on our culture), and I’m not that excited to overload on male writers just yet. I know this really means that I need to dig a little deeper and search a little harder to find the good stuff, but in the meantime, I have a few on my shelves, including one that I […]

Mine eyes have seen the glory

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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Buckle up, this one is pretty long.  I finished this book a few days ago and the impression it made on me was so visceral, I had to wait to write about it.   When I consider what it takes to be a classic, regardless of the medium, my first thought is timelessness.  Will this item stand the test of time and all that entails?  I believe that the term classic is bandied about too often and too frivolously. We call anything that we like […]



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