Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It is the best of times and worst of times, to read Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

by 3 Comments

Okay, yes, that is a Dicken’s quote, and it would have been more appropriate to use Shakespeare, but the sentiment is there.  Being on the verge of a potential pandemic makes reading Station Eleven occasionally challenging, as it’s easy to extrapolate how this could happen.  However, the book ends in hope.  While the world has gone through an apocalypse, people are still creating and sharing art, lifting each other up by nourishing the soul.  And I would hope the same would happen in our world […]

Station Eleven isn’t what I thought it’d be, but it’s good at what it is

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

by Leave a Comment

Station Eleven is the tale of a group survivors of a flu pandemic that kills 99.9% of the world’s population. The story alternates between the characters’ points of views, covering their lives from ten years before the pandemic to twenty years after. Unbeknownst to the survivors, they are connected by events and people from their pre-pandemic lives.  The book begins with the death of Arthur Leander as he performs King Lear. Paramedic Jeevan Chaudhary tries unsuccessfully to save Arthur’s life. Child actress Kirsten Raymond’s is […]

Survival is Insufficient

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

by 4 Comments

In the present day, an actor is performing as King Lear on stage. He falters, flubs his lines, and stumbles. A man in the audience, a paramedic, runs to his aid, but the actor has had a heart attack and cannot be saved. He is Arthur Leander, a famous actor of stage and screen, the news of his death would be everywhere, except within a few hours the Georgia Flu hits, and the scale of death obliterates his. We follow the paramedic, Jeevan Chaudhary, for […]

Announcing 2020 #CannonBookClub Topics and Dates!

by 1 Comment

For CBR12 we’re planning three book clubs that we hope will inspire you to pick up a new to you book or reread something and consider it again. On March 20th and 21st we’ll celebrate five years of #CannonBookClub and revisit our first book – Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. We have lots of new faces, as well as plenty of us who have been around since Cannonball Read 7 so it seemed the perfect time to revisit one of my favorite books […]

The Country of Money

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

by 3 Comments

The lovely crystalclear was sharing her spoils from bookcon, and the pre-sale copy of Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel was in her pile. I nabbed it, excited for Mandel after loving Station 11, and also looking forward to a literary shift after my Rowell YA obsession. In Mandel’s usual style of telling stories from multiple viewpoints in moving times and places, The Glass Hotel spans New York City and rural Canada, the early 2000s to the Great Recession, and through the present day, with our […]

First we only want to be seen…After that, we want to be remembered.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

by 3 Comments

CBR11 BINGO: Cannonballer Says Since CBR6, Cannonballers have been (mostly) raving about this book. It was a CBR7 book club selection, faintingviolet read it more than once and the list of Cannonball reviews is over 34 and spanning CBR6 to CBR11. My eyes began to blur while attempting to calculate it. Suffice it to say, it is a looooonnnnngggggg list. Caitlin_D said that she was “late to the party” 3 1/2 years ago when she read and reviewed it. Maybe that makes my review the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo