Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Beware the Chocolate Mouse!

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

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Rosemary’s Baby is the story of Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, a young couple living in New York City in the 1960’s. Living on Guy’s salary (he’s a barely making ends meet actor), they, or mostly Rosemary, decide they have to move into the Bramford, Levin’s answer to the Dakota. Welcomed by their neighbors Minnie and Roman Castevet and their tenant Terry Gionoffri, Rosemary and Guy quickly settle in. Guy becomes very close to the Castevets, especially after poor Terry throws herself out their window which […]

“It sounded like the first line of a poem: They never stop, these Stepford Wives, they something, something all their lives. Work like robots? Yes, that would fit. They work like robots all their lives.”

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

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Thanks to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Another banger from Ira Levin. I didn’t love it quite as much as Rosemary’s Baby, but you can clearly tell that this dude could write, and was waaay ahead of his time. And the actual book is much more subtle and impressive than its pop culture residue would have you believe. (Don’t even get me started on the bastardization that is the 2004 film. Now that I’ve read […]

Ira Levin (1)

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

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“A city’s blank white concrete slabs, the giant ones ringed by the less giant, gave space in their midst to a broad pink-floored plaza, a playground in which two hundred young children played and exercised under the care of a dozen supervisors in white coveralls.” On the one hand, I feel like this novel basically got plagiarized by the early 2000s movie “The Island” which has an almost identical dystopian vision about the world, and a similar plotline. But on the other hand, I swear […]

Sliver

Sliver by Ira Levin

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I grabbed this book at a book fair for free. It was not free so much as the book fair had a deal where you could bring a bag in and they would charge you five dollars to fill the bag up. So this book was more or less free, and given how thin the book was, and how over stuffed the bag was, like I said, it’s essentially free. Wow, you’re thinking, you’re really spending a lot of time explaining just how free this […]

Baby Baby Baby

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

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This was one where I read the book before seeing the movie, both of which I did over Halloween weekend (Happy Halloween to me!). I had read, and admired Ira Levin’s Boys from Brazil years ago. Part of my issue with those kinds of high concept stories is that writers get too lost in the concept itself and fail to tell the story. Levin does not suffer from that problem. I’ve probably waited too long to read this (Stepford Wives as well). The premise is well known to […]

Rosemary Reads Rosemary

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

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Rosemary’s Baby is one of my favorite films. Once I read the book I realized that the film followed it pretty closely. In some scenes, word for word. So taking it to the ultimate meta I guess, I decided to listen to the film’s Rosemary, Mia Farrow, read the classic horror novel by Ira Levin. She did not disappoint. Her interpretation helped me see the story through Rosemary’s eyes. Farrow ably portrays the extremely naive Rosemary, who is starstruck by her ambitious actor husband Guy. […]



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