Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Dead men tell no tales….. unless it is in the form of a trilogy

Exquisite Corpse by Penelope Bagieu

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With a title like Exquisite Corpse, I was not sure what to expect. What journey was Penelope Bagieu (with translation by Alexis Siegel) going to take me on? Was I going to be Brazen or would I be California Dreaming again? Neither. I was in the middle of Pairs, locked in an apartment with one crazy-a$$ author, a girl who is as naïve as she is a selfish-20-something and one editor who put the fatale in femme fatale. Zoe is less than sophisticated. She hates […]

“All his life he’d used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe.”

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On a prose level, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed the first two, which were extremely clever and a bit raw. Here, with Patrick sober (for several years, it’s implied), he once again is one among many points of view, just as he was in the first book as a five year old, when his parents’ dinner guests held most of the narrative focus. Here the party is for some duke or other on his birthday, and the Princess Margaret is […]

“How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought . . .” #CBRBingo

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“Everything was under control. No, he mustn’t think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. […]

One day in the south of France, 1968. #CBRBingo

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Project: Catch Up On Review Backlog, review #10 out of 16 Pretty much ever since I abandoned grad school before I completed my doctorate (English lit!), I have been allergic to lit-fic. There is just something about modern literary fiction that hits me the wrong way. Most of it feels to me like the author is trying to impress me, to say something PROFOUND, and a heck of a lot of it is just middle aged white guys having mid-life crises in exactly the same […]

Not for me.

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The definition of meh for me. I should have known better, and I feel like my not enjoying this book is my fault. I am usually not into lit-fic, except on rare occasions. But this was recommended to me by one of those Book Riot quizzes where it was like, if you like this and this and this, then you should pick up ______. I read the synopsis and said, hmmm, that does sound like I would enjoy it! I was lured in with the […]

Well, this was a book.

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I’ve owned this book in hardcover since it was first published in 2006. Every once in a while over the last twelve years or so, I’ve looked at it and thought, oh I should read that, and then proceeded to not do that. This was in my college years, when I bought books a) Just because they were pretty, b) When I couldn’t afford them, and c) Indiscriminately, without doing any research about them. I had not read any Stephen King yet, at all, either, so yeah, let’s buy this […]



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