Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Many Americans right now are acting like Jeevan in the snowstorm. Life is imitating art.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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I didn’t really know what to expect going into this.  I knew that Cannonball peeps (and other people I know) had raved about it, so I assumed it was going to be good.  And it still wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. (I need to stop going into things with expectations.)    Station Eleven has a linear story that’s been cut up and rearranged with one character being the lynchpin that holds it all together.  We start with a Toronto production of […]

Book Club Discussion Post: Station Eleven Revisited

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Welcome to our first #CannonBookClub of 2020 – a return trip to Station Eleven. When MsWas and I discussed revisiting our first book club book six months ago we couldn’t have known what the state of the world would be when we got to March. COVID-19 is very different than the Georgian Flu, but it certainly gave us a new lens through which to view Emily St. John Mandel’s book. On to the boilerplate: ground rules remain the same as they always have. For those […]

Maybe a Perfect Book?

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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This is my third reading of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. It is one of my favorite books of the past few years, a book that I find to be nearly perfect. This reread was for Book Club. It is also an extremely prescient time to be reading a book about a global pandemic, but I’m glad that Covid-19 isn’t nearly as devastating as the Georgian Flu. What I was struck with this time through was how Mandel structured the pass-offs between characters. On […]

Tacoma calls, it’s waiting there to get rid of us all, when the big one comes better hope the car don’t stall.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Weirdly, my cannonball thus far has been strongly apocalyptic, which has been… interesting in light of current events. You’d think that this would make me more anxious, but paradoxically I’m looking at the real world and thinking “eh, people are hoarding toilet paper, but every grocery store I’ve been to has been relatively full if you’re not hyper specific about what you want. No one is stealing out of each others carts or housejacking like in The Mandibles” (Lionel Shriver’s book about the financial collapse […]

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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I thought I remembered much more of Station Eleven than I did; I had remembered it as a story of Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony and several scrapes with some religious extremists. I remembered Jeevan in the fortress of his brother’s tower. I remembered skulking through rotting schools and all-encompassing trees. What strikes me now is how immediately the sense of dread starts to kick in; there is no slow build; a statement about everything falling to pieces kicks in within the first chapter. Maybe […]

The most beautiful book about the end of the world you’ll ever read

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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When I read that Station Eleven would be a book club read, I decided to borrow it from my local library. I wasn’t familiar with it, but I knew that it came recommended by many in the CBR community. I had no idea this book would be so beautiful and so moving, the first book I’ve read in 2020 that I truly love. Station Eleven is the story of our world before and after its collapse as the result of a pandemic so devestating that […]



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