Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“How to quantify the quality of being alive?”

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

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CBR Bingo square: Bodies. I read this one closer to the start of my summer of Irish fiction, in an independent study with a student who needed just a couple more credits to graduate. I wanted something pretty contemporary to close out on, so I gave her a choice between Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars, which I’d already read, and The Wonder, which I had not. She picked The Wonder.  Donoghue has explained that this novel was inspired by the Victorian phenomenon of “fasting girls,” in which […]

Ten mostly good fiction books

Normal people by Sally Rooney

Conversations with friends by Sally Rooney

The amateur marriage by Anne Tyler

The pull of the stars by Emma Donoghue

Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Holes by Louis Sachar

The princess bride by William Goldman

The legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Normal people by Sally Rooney I’d watched the series before I read the book and yet the series didn’t put me off reading it. I suffered through it, just as I suffered through this book about Marianne and Connell. Two kids who go to the same school, and then later on to the same university, their lives entwined. We witness their strange dance as they struggle to communicate plainly with each other and fail again and again. Marianne is a broken person. Connell is sort […]

More than just a pandemic novel

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

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The timing of The Pull of the Stars is so perfect as to be suspicious. A novel set in 1918 Dublin, at the peak of the first wave of the Spanish flu, arriving in late July of 2020 after our first stint of lockdown? Uncanny, almost. But of course Donoghue had conceived the novel two years earlier, during the 2018 centenary commemorations of the 1918 pandemic, and had submitted her final manuscript to her publishers in March of last year–at which point her publishers (Little, Brown/Pan […]

far from the confines of any one Room…

Astray by Emma Donoghue

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not my best title, it’s true- but also not the best collection. I picked this up while looking for different work from Donoghue, and while it was not what I wanted it was a (mostly) pleasant way to spend my time. The idea is cool; this collection is filled with (often very) short stories divided into three “chapters”: Departures, In Transit, and Arrivals and Aftermaths. Each story is set in a different time; most are within the 19th century, but two creep into the 20th […]

Slightly Less Bleak Than the Previous Historical Fiction Involving Performers that I Read This Year…

Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

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So, funny thing about listening to this one in audiobook form, should you (like myself) choose to play books at 1.5 speed or more: the speaking will be a good and understandable pace, but every time a song gets sung by the reader, it comes out in a silly little lilt that sounded quite humorous to me every time, even if the mood of the novel or the song itself at that point was not supposed to be cheerful and funny. So fair warning about […]

Not a prince

Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

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Back to the goodwill from whence you came. I picked this up because I liked Room, the cover, and the dollar price tag. It was worth the buck I paid, and when I went to Amazon for the link and found the other reviewers gave it a 3 star average I thought “yep, that’s about right.” I feel bad picking on Donoghue for a book she obviously put a lot of thought into and researched thoroughly, but I’m kind of over historical fiction that reads […]



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