Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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CBR15 BINGO: Sex, because people are having casual sex in this book, except for Jake because. . .ya know. It has been banned and challenged because of its focus on sex (in addition to general debauchery). BINGO: South America, Politics, Take Flight, In the Wild, Sex “You’re an expatriate, you’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an […]

I can listen to video readings of two classics. Can you?

Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? by Dr. Seuss

Fox in Socks: Dr. Seuss’s Book of Tongue Tanglers by Dr. Seuss

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CBR15Passport other format (audio & video of a books) My phone was actually working the other night (I have a bad plan that allows my fast internet to go too fast, as in used up) when I found a video of Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? At first, I was “Really? Do we need people reading Dr. Seuss? Isn’t that a more personal reading event?” But then I saw that it was going to be rapped. Okay, I’m interested. I am not a rap […]

“Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.”

The Three Musketeers (The d'Artagnan Romances, #1) by Alexandre Dumas

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Nobody told me this book would be funny! Well, in case you didn’t know it, this book is funny! I did know it would be ridiculously long, but I did the audiobook, and Bill Homewood was a very fun narrator, and it didn’t feel as long as it could have. For some reason, I’ve always thought this book would be boring, but it’s a swashbuckling adventure Romance, so in hindsight that was a weird opinion to have. Maybe because the cover looks boring, or I’m […]

“I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.”

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

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Even though after reading Henry James in school several times and then declaring him my nemesis, for he is the master triumphant of the never-ending sentence, and saying I would never read from him again, I could not then resist the pull of an audiobook narrated by Emma Thompson, and indeed I am glad I did not do so. Phewf, done with that nonsense. That is what it is like to read Henry James. The first paragraph in The Wings of the Dove nearly killed […]

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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In one word: Staggering Cannonball Read Bingo: Hot I will never recover from the origins of this book. That Mary Shelley started writing it to tell a spooky story on a rainy day AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN is staggering. And that this story has stood the test of time and become such a classic and revisited tale, so much so that I’m re-reading this book that I read when I was 13 because my kid is now reading it at 13? Astounding. So to […]

Look for the Bare Necessities! Classic storytelling, talking animals, and a scoop of racism.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

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CBR 14 BINGO: Snake, because snakes figure into multiple stories in this book (Kaa the snake in Mowgli’s stories, and Nag & Nagaina in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”) The Jungle Book has got to be the classic “Love it AND Hate it” book. On the one hand you get classic storytelling by a Nobel-prize winning author and talking animals. On the other hand, you get to feel uncomfortable in a way that only a 19th-Century white man born under the British Raj in India can make you feel. […]



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