Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

by 2 Comments

I have a confession to make: I made it to thirty-nine years old, never having read The Little Prince. I knew of it, of course, that it was a mind-bending children’s classic and emotional philosophical journey, and I purchased a copy with the intent to read it…12 years ago. This slim novella traveled from Tennessee to Louisiana to Illinois and I never cracked it open. It was a matter of missed opportunities: I felt like I should read it, but that I should have already […]

Repetitive yet hypnotic, a grand tragedy

The Iliad by Homer

by 2 Comments

“The wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfilment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds.” So begins E. V. Rieu’s translation (for Penguin Classics in 1950) of Homer’s Iliad, a prose translation of Greek hexameter verse, telling of the story of an incident, over only a few weeks, in the interminable ten-year Trojan war. We […]

Prospero is a dickhead.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

by Leave a Comment

I‘m tempted to just let the title be my review, but if I want to count this review towards my total, it has to be at least 250 words. I haven’t read this play in ten years. I’ve never seen it performed. It’s never been my favorite, even though I’ve read it several times now. The best parts of it involve several of Shakespeare’s most classic lines: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, […]

“You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man.”

Native Son by Richard Wright

by Leave a Comment

My brain is mush today, but I have time to try and catch up on reviews, so I’m going to attempt to review a masterpiece of literature while coasting on an ebb tide of intelligence. This is, I believe, the book I have owned the longest without reading. I’ve moved ten times since I bought it in college for a class that didn’t even end up reading it. I have kept it all this time, through lo so many book purges, because I always meant […]

Werther is a selfish, entitled, overly dramatic arsehole and I am glad he is dead

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

by 8 Comments

Content Warning for suicide. I am kind of sad this book marks my first cannonball, but oh well… When book bingo asked for a “White Whale”, I had a hard time picking a book. It’s just that I couldn’t think of anything I’d been meaning to read forever. And then I remembered the audiobook I bought back in 2016 when my bookclub read it, but I never did. It’d been sitting on my phone for over 5 years, and it was only a little over […]

I love the smell of colonialism in the morning

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

by 7 Comments

I was so disappointed in the last two books I read that I decided to shift gears and read something more “weighty.” I’d been missing beautiful writing and thought-provoking content, so I turned to my TBR list for ideas and came up with Heart of Darkness, a short novel that I’d always meant to read but had never gotten around to. It’s an important English novella published in 1899 by a Polish author about a British steamboat captain sailing through Africa; 80 years later it […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo