Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bad books make for a good read

Bad Book Club by Robin Ince

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Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club is a funny and interesting tour through some of the books you will never find in Waterstones, hidden as they are inside charity and secondhand shops. Robin Ince has made a habit of collecting these books – the more esoteric or eccentric, the better – and reading them so that we don’t have to. Taking us into a world of ‘celebrity’ autobiographies (with those on the lower end of the fame scale and yet high on ego providing the more […]

This book is a lot. #CBRBingo

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I was skeptical going in to this. If you’re following my reviews, you probably know that lit fic and I don’t always get along. And it was a bit dense, especially at first. I knew going in this was made up of a series of interlocking stories, which was probably another  reason I was wary. It’s actually cooler than that, though. The book is structured in a sort of mirror. The first story is set in the 18th century and is told as a diary, […]

The madwoman in the attic.

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I don’t know why I’m surprised I didn’t enjoy this. I nearly always react poorly to post-modernism. But, I really *wanted* to enjoy it. Every time I’ve read Jane Eyre, I’ve thought Bertha Rochester, née Mason, got a really shit deal. I’ve also thought it was really suspect that we don’t actually get any evidence of her going mad prior to being locked in an attic for years and years. I mean, if I’d been locked in an attic for that long maybe I would start […]

Who Was…. Part two

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Yes, I have mentioned the Who Is/Who Was series before, but I have several of the titles and could not let good reads go to waste! This time: Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.? and Who Was Barack Obama? and Who Was Amelia Earhart? and Who Was Charles Darwin are the “newest” ones devoured. Of course, pairing Martin Luther King, Jr. and Obama is natural. Two men of color who broke racial barriers. But why pair Earhart and Darwin, too? Earhart broke down barriers, too, […]

My least favorite of the series, but still worth reading, if you liked the first three.

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“Did you know,” said Patrick, addressing Seamus again, “that among the caribou herdsmen of Lapland, the top shaman gets to drink the urine of the reindeer that has eaten the magic mushrooms, and his assistant drinks the urine of the top shaman, and so on, all the way down to the lowest of the low who scramble in the snow, pleading for a splash of twelfth-generation caribou piss?” “I didn’t know that,” said Seamus flatly. “I thought it was your special field,” said Patrick, surprised. “Anyhow, […]

History develops. Art stands still

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“Good writing can only be learned from good writing.” This book is a collection of lectures that Forster gave at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927. It grabs you immediately as he dismisses temporality and time periods in the discussion of the merits of novels and, instead, places all writers in the same room writing from some sort of shared humanity. “We may say that History develops, Art stands still” From that he sets out to deconstruct the novel, discussing it not as a set or […]



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