Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd”

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Before reading the subject of this review, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, I had previously read his Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. I greatly enjoyed all of these books, and can say the same for The Idiot. The story centers on Prince Lev Nikolayevitch Myshkin, called simply prince, who returns to Russia after spending years in Switzerland under the care of a doctor for his epileptic fits. Penniless, he first makes his way to a general who is married to a […]

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper.

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

My Mum is a Twat by Anoushka Warden

Bella Bella by Harvey Fierstein

Intimations by Zadie Smith

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton

Leviathan by Paul Auster

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Light of Day by Eric Ambler

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Humiliated and Insulted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rumble Fish by SE Hinton

Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani

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The Cruelest Month – 3/5 Stars This is the third Louise Penny “Inspector Gamache” detective novel, and I think it’s a decided dip in quality from an overarching look at it. The mystery itself, quaint, small town, punctuated with poetry and art and other little considerations is perfectly interesting. At a seance, from a combination of fright and maybe poisoning, a woman is found dead. There must be an elaborate set of circumstances to come to pass to have her die, but if they were […]

Toward the end of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o’clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full steam.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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So the first part of this book, the setup, the premise, and some of the early action is basically the same as Elf. Myshkin, a minor and ultimately broke Prince in Russia, is released from a sanitarium (for mental health) and has been isolated from the world to such a degree that when he shows up into the world of the Russian aristocracy he’s either fresh-faced and innocent, or naive to otherwise more cutthroat world of that milieu. In a lot of ways, it’s either an […]

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The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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When I was a freshman in high school I made a new friend that I loved hanging out with. He was unlike anyone I met previously. Any weekend spent at his house led to weeks of stories I could relive of mundane things made memorable. A walk to the gas station for burritos, for example, turned into an odyssey of exploring old train tracks, running from neighborhood dogs, jam sessions, and meeting girls. He was so fun to be around and I felt like an […]

So here it is, at last, a confrontation with reality.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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This book is kind of really funny but also maybe not entirely supposed to be funny. But then again, I think that Dostoyevsky is seen as very serious, and he is, but there’s some irony built in there. But I read this this morning while I was at the coffee shop, which I tend to do on weekends. I showed up and there’s a group of three sets of parents and a handful of kids taking up 15% of the tables in the shop but […]

The Brother Karamehzov

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The Brothers Karamazov is a classic novel centering around the Karamazov family. The father is a sensualist, as his eldest son. The middle son is an intellectual, and the youngest son is deeply religious. Due to decades of strained relations, as well as love triangle more complicated than something from Riverdale, the father is murdered. His own son stands accused. It’s the stuff of high drama, and was a bucket list book for me to read. Unfortunately, after four months of reading, I respected but […]



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