Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

by 4 Comments

Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

Are you shining just for me?

City of Girls (2019) by Elizabeth Gilbert

by 4 Comments

CBR14 Bingo square: Scandal! Vivian Morris is involved in a scandal that scandalises her suburban upper middle-class family; the theatre is generally considered to be a disreputable environment by the polite society that relishes it. Whether or not you like City of Girls will depend on whether or not you like Vivian Morris, narrator and heroine, who is a white rich suburban girl (daddy owns a mine, mother is obsessed with horses) kicked out of Vassar in 1940 and sent to live with her theatrical […]

Could have been a 10 minute TED talk

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

by Leave a Comment

I am a big Elizabeth Gilbert fan- I loved Eat Pray Love and The Signature of All Things (City of Girls is on my TBR list)- so I looked forward to hearing her thoughts on the creative process. Sadly, this isn’t one of her best works. It feels devoid of substance, more like an influencer post on how to live a more creative life. The ideas in this book could have been a 10 minute TED talk: create for creation’s sake rather than trying to […]

How I met your (1940s) father

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

by Leave a Comment

I never actually did read or watch Eat, Pray, Love so my disdain for the work of Elizabeth Gilbert was purely by cultural osmosis. I can’t say City of Girls did much to elevate her for me, though. It wasn’t bad, but neither was it good. It just kind of … was. The novel is narrated as a confessional of sorts, an older woman telling a younger woman the story of how she met her father so the whole meat of the story is in extended flashbacks. […]

telling over showing: the novel

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

by 9 Comments

This novel is the literary embodiment of the kid who sat in the front row of your lecture course and had a long-winded comment to add to every. single. statement. made by your instructor. Not only do we go on a botanical exploration in the late 1700s- we go with CAPTAIN COOK! Not only do we supply pharmaceuticals to explorers- we sell to LEWIS AND CLARKE THEMSELVES! Not only did we happen upon the theory of evolution, but we BEAT DARWIN TO IT! These aren’t […]

Eat, Pray, England

by 6 Comments

The free books of England continue to get me in trouble. Perusing the racks of the book-exchange sections in my Tescos is such an easy commitment. It’s free books! There are no fees, you don’t have to return them. They can sit for ages on your bookshelf. You can even pick up the ridiculous overrated piece of white girl trash just to mock it and laugh and say “I am so much better than that!” I am not better than that. Eat, Pray, Love is […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo