Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If you’re patient it’s not a bad read.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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Dracula as a phenomenon has pretty much taken on a life of its own to the point where I thought I knew all about it.I mean, Dracula is Dracula right?! Turns out I don’t! Dracula isn’t at all what I expected. It is told through a collection of diary entries, letters, notes and telegrams following various people through the novel. The story opens with Jonathan Harker traveling from London to the estate of Dracula in Transylvania. It’s all very spooky and mysterious, Dracula doesn’t eat, […]

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

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This is it. The last review of my cannonball! And what a book I have chosen to go out on. A friend of mine, seeing on Goodreads that I was edging toward my reading goal for the year, reached out to me with some graphic novel suggestions that I could tackle quickly to get across the finish line. It was great to have her support, and her endorsement that graphic novels “do count” which, of course they do! One of her suggestions was the graphic […]

Well, this was definitely a book. I will not be rating it.

The 120 Days of Sodom, or The School of Libertinage by Marquise de Sade

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So, I wrote this upon finishing this book: “Ummmm. Give me a while to pull some thoughts together.” That was mid-October. I don’t think I’ve managed to pull those thoughts together. I don’t think I ever will. I mean, I read some reviews going in to this book, but even the ones that were explicit about the contents didn’t prepare me. I picked this book up because of the Read Harder Challenge. One of the challenges was to read a book that was written in […]

familiar fables

Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue

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Familiar stories are passed, one by one, from one storyteller to another. There are thirteen tales in Kissing the Witch; some will be immediately recognizable, some will require you to dust off your mental library, and some are fantastically new- conjured from collective memory and superstition but new none the less. Each tale is handed off from teller to teller; frequently the perceived villain will be the heroine of the following story. Most are, to quote Emmylou Harris, “full of heartbreak and desire”. She sings that […]

“How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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I don’t have the time or energy to write as much or as deeply as I would like to about this strange, 100+ year old book, so I’m just going to settle with posting some brief thoughts below. Somehow I managed to make it out of years and years of schooling, with two English degrees, without reading this book. Which is right up my alley! All that discussion of monsters and things that are taboo swathed in metaphor. I love that shit. When I first […]

L’Engle, I just wanna hug you. THANK. YOU.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle

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Okay. Honesty time. I am trying to wrest a full cannonball from the jaws of defeat. Once I get this review written I’m at 48, I’m halfway through reading one book and 7/8 through tackling another on audio so that’s got me at 50 which is SO. CLOSE. So, I picked up Wrinkle in Time partially to get another one in the W column; however, I am hoping/trying to get my ten-year-old to read it (and the quintet) because duh, awesome. I threw the word […]



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