Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Realistic shades of friendship

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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CBR17 Bingo: “Culture” – this book is very much rooted in the culture of a small town near Naples, Italy. I had never heard of My Brilliant Friend (2016) until I saw the NYT’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” I had read a good number of books from that list, but I was a little disappointed that I had missed number one. If nothing else, I am a sucker for a list, so it didn’t take me long before I got around to remedying my […]

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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Do you know anyone  who’s just obsessed with what they were like as a little kid? They can talk for hours about their elementary school teachers, their friends from the neighborhood, first crushes, friendship betrayals, every time their parents were unfair to them, how mean their siblings could be, etc? Aren’t they just exhausting? My Brilliant Friend is the first volume of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which followst two female friends throughout their entire lives. At the beginning, set in 2010, 60-something Elena Greco receives word […]

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Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With:

's CBR16 Review No:75 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: ·

Elena Ferrante (1)

In the Margins by Elena Ferrante

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“Ladies and gentlemen, this evening I am going to talk to you about the desire to write and the two kinds of writing, it seems to, I know best, the first compliant, the second impetuous.” There’s probably going to be a whole series of literature that stems from the pandemic (and already has) and then a further subset of that literature where something was upended by the pandemic. Here, we have a series of lectures originally planned to be delivered live from Elena Ferrante — […]

Ferrante Never Misses

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

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…I state, after only reading two of her novels and two of her shorter pieces…but at this rate, I am all-in on Elena Ferrante and I am STILL mad at myself for taking this long to catch on. I’m two books deep in the Neapolitan Novels, but I had to interrupt my trajectory for two reasons: I needed to read this story before seeing the new (read: 2021) film adaptation I need to see the film in order to solidify all of my (mostly negative) […]

once again: great book, TERRIBLE cover

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

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The cover is even WORSE this time- not only do we have another DIY looking illustration,  but the featured pull quote from The Australian‘s John Freeman is ABYSMAL: “Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.” Fuck right off, guy. Emphasis on GUY. Just because Austen characters aren’t slapping and cussing each other out does not mean that they aren’t also filled with the contained rage of being a woman trapped in position- a woman who will do […]

A book written out of spite

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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Probably every book lover I know has recommended this series to me and I get why. We’re really hard on Hollywood movies for their saminess, but books are no different. It is extremely rare to read something really new. This is that book. Plot: Honestly it doesn’t matter, this book isn’t about plot, but broadly it’s about a brilliant woman born in a time and place where women weren’t really given the space to be brilliant. Most stories, would focus on this brilliant woman overcoming all […]



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