Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Look for the Bare Necessities! Classic storytelling, talking animals, and a scoop of racism.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

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CBR 14 BINGO: Snake, because snakes figure into multiple stories in this book (Kaa the snake in Mowgli’s stories, and Nag & Nagaina in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”) The Jungle Book has got to be the classic “Love it AND Hate it” book. On the one hand you get classic storytelling by a Nobel-prize winning author and talking animals. On the other hand, you get to feel uncomfortable in a way that only a 19th-Century white man born under the British Raj in India can make you feel. […]

I liked it, even though it could use more dragons

A Natural History of Dragons, A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan

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CBR BINGO: Monster, because there be dragons in here! BINGO: Rec’d, Monster, Verse, Bird, Time First of all, I love this image on the cover. The idea of a naturalist who studies dragons is appealing to me, as someone who a) enjoys naturalist memoirs and b) enjoys fantasy. The marriage of science and fantasy appeals to my nature, and I was very excited to read this book. And, I enjoyed it. But I didn’t love it as I hoped. A Natural History of Dragons is […]

Taking the Font category literally for a Bingo!

Just My Type, A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield

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CBR 14 BINGO: Font, because this book is literally about typefaces, which consist of fonts BINGO: Shadow, Adapt, Funky, Scandal, Font Before reading this book, I considered myself a bit of a typography geek, because I take pleasure in selecting the most perfect typeface for any situation, and also because I have seen the documentary Helvetica. I realize now, though, that I do not deserve that title, because I clearly do not know enough about typefaces to be able to distinguish Times New Roman from Georgia […]

Franz Kafka got together with Charles Dickens and wrote an episode of the X-Files based on Little Shop of Horrors

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

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CBR BINGO 14: Funky: Where Steampunk meets your nightmares “The city reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.” Those two sentences, from the second paragraph of Chapter 1 of Period Street Station, captivated me: the delicious smells of a bustling market intermingling with the filth […]

Behold the communication device of the future!

How It Works: The Telephone by Ladybird Books

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CBR14 BINGO: Series, because this book is part of the Ladybird “How it Works” series published in the 1970s. I never pass a Little Free Library without checking out what’s on offer, and one day a few weeks ago I struck gold. Never has one person’s trash become such a treasure. Thanks to Ladybird Books, I was about to learn about how telephones work, or at least how they worked in 1972. This book begins with some history of the telephone and why we need […]

Dignity

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

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CBR14 BINGO: Adapt, because it was adapted into the wonderful 1993 film of the same name “I’m telling you, sir, you’ll be sorry if you don’t take a walk up there. And you never know. A couple  more years and it might be too late.” This advice from a stranger on a country road to the novel’s protagonist is meant to encourage the traveler to walk up a hill and enjoy a beautiful view, but it may as well be an observation about the protagonist’s […]



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