Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Why should you love him whom the world hates so? Because he love me more than all the world.”

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

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It’s great reading a book where you’re not 100% sure what the author thought of his subject; it makes you not 100% what you think of the book. As you can’t tell from the title, Dark Renaissance is about Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare contemporary who had a brilliant albeit brief career, dying at the age of 29 during an alleged brawl over a bill. There is not a whole lot of information about Marlowe available (even the possible sole portrait of Marlowe has not been actually […]

I liked this more on re-read in some ways, and a lot less in others.

Marvel 1602 by Neil Gaiman

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The first time I read this I wasn’t very well-versed in comics, in the Marvel universe in particular, or in Gaiman’s work. There was barely an MCU in 2011. The First Avenger would be released three months later. 1602 was an okay read for me at the time, but I remembered almost nothing about it before picking it up again. I definitely liked it more this time, and got more out of it, but there was some stuff that was sort of perplexing and things […]

“We all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.”

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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There is a lot to say about Shakespeare, but there is not a lot to know. Bill Bryson, everyone’s favorite kindly uncle, lays the facts bare while gently chiding all of the (mostly bonkers) “hopeful suppositions” that have been presented as facts by well-meaning and often obsessed fans, historians, and scholars. Bryson, himself an acolyte at the altar of Shakespeare, paints a bright and brisk portrait of the man that we know to be Shakespeare. We know very few things about him; there are only […]

Back to Rotherweird and further weirdness

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I really like Rotherweird, so I knew I wanted to get the sequel Wyntertide. The problem was that I had purchased Rotherweird in Edinburgh, Scotland last summer and hadn’t ever seen it here in the US. So how to get the newly released sequel which was only available online and included international shipping? I call Mother who lives about 2 hours from Glasgow (Scotland still) to see if she would have time to check a bookstore or two next time she was in the city, […]



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