Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Can you imagine a life where all you have to do is summer in the Italian countryside?

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

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CBR12 BINGO: I Wish Double BINGO! Vertical: The Roaring 20s, Pandemic, Friendship, Green, I Wish Horizontal: Money, No Money, Repeat, I Wish, Violet The title of my review comes from the classic episode of The Office in which we learn about the Finer Things Club. Oscar: Can you imagine a life where all you have to do is summer in the Italian countryside? Pam: And spend time with George Emerson. That’s what I would do. That sums up why I selected A Room with a View […]

Written in 1914, but Not Published Until Almost 60 Years Later

Maurice by E.M. Forster

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I’ll admit I have not read any of E.M. Forster’s novels before, though I have seen the film adaptation of A Room with a View. As is often the case for me, reading these older British novels makes me hit a bit of a wall in terms of the language that I don’t when watching adaptations: for some reason the manner of speech is hard for me to get into! But do I keep reading such books anyways? Obviously! And truly sometimes I forget my […]

History develops. Art stands still

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“Good writing can only be learned from good writing.” This book is a collection of lectures that Forster gave at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927. It grabs you immediately as he dismisses temporality and time periods in the discussion of the merits of novels and, instead, places all writers in the same room writing from some sort of shared humanity. “We may say that History develops, Art stands still” From that he sets out to deconstruct the novel, discussing it not as a set or […]

“Money pads the edges of things. God help those who have none.”

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First, a confession. I can count on my right hand the number of books in my lifetime I haven’t finished. As a rule, I finish all books I start (even if it takes years). You never know when they will turn around on you. This used to be one of the few. I was in my last year of grad school at the time, and only got about 80% of the way through before our class discussion, and just . . . never got around […]

Live in fragments no longer.

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mI recently ordered a month of Starz through Amazon (I wanted to watch the Lonesome Dove miniseries and Starz was the only place it was streaming) and determined to get my monies worth I decided to look at some of the other offerings, including the most recent adaptation of Howards End. I mean, I watched the really terrible show Conviction for Hayley Atwell, Howards End feels like the least I could do. At the time I started watching it the miniseries was only two episodes […]

“Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”

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I’ve always confused A Room with a View with A Room of One’s Own. I recently reviewed a book about how to understand literature, and it recommended one or both of those two books. I can’t remember which. I’ll read them both! Amazon recently released a free version of A Room with a View, so I downloaded and gave it the old college try. ARWAV, as the kids call it (no they don’t) is clever, cheeky, romantic, and Romantic. I may not be the target audience for the book, but […]



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