Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Effects of Misogyny – From A(twood) to Z(umas)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

by 2 Comments

So apparently real life isn’t depressing and dystopian enough, so I made June my month to read (and re-read) books that construct an all too believable future for women and their reproductive rights. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was my book club’s pick for June and though I don’t know if I would use the phrase “looking forward to it” to describe how I felt about re-reading this novel, I was definitely curious to revisit it.  I read the book about a year after it […]

Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence…

Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Tent by Margaret Atwood

Tiny Crimes by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

by Leave a Comment

Natural Causes – 3 Stars This is Barbara Ehrenreich’s muckraking polemic on the death industries. Kind of. It shares a lot of similarities with Jessica Mitford’s classic book(s) The American Way of Death (and The American Way of Death Revisited, which is probably the version to read these days), but rather than focusing on the funeral industry, which this book hardly mentions, the focus is on the prolonging of life that especially Americans put themselves through. This books covers health food, health fads, exercise, medicine, […]

Prospero Atwood

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

by 1 Comment

Oh my god.  How was this THIS good? This book shouldn’t have been this good.  The premise sounds insane. A retelling of The Tempest where our Prospero is an exiled theater director setting his own (previously thwarted) adaptation of The Tempest in a corrections facility.  It’s the definition of Should Not Work. Not only does it, it’s one of her best. Atwood intelligently uses meta text throughout the book, which made this (more than the other Hogarth Shakespeare I’ve read so far) feel more like […]

Rennie can see what she is now: she’s an object of negotiation.

Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood

by Leave a Comment

(Photo:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/160728.Bodily_Harm) There’s a blurb on the back of my copy from Marilyn French, a more or less contemporary of Margaret Atwood’s, who says of this book “Romance and adventure by a female Graham Greene at his peak” and at first I thought it was dismissive in a strange way, but then I started reading, and thought — well, I’ll be damned. So it does share a lot of similarities with Graham Greene in a few key ways, or more with a certain set of Graham […]

Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again

by 1 Comment

So I bought a house.  Moved my mother in with us in her own apartment. Sold her place. Renovated our old one to ready it for rental.  Got half new staff at work. Raising the tiny one.  It’s been a bit since I’ve posted, but life has been hectic.  Nothing like a nice relaxing read to soothe my jangled nerves, so of course I pick The Handmaid’s Tale to read (and make my coworker book club cohorts read for our first selection.) I’m a masochist. […]

The play’s the thing

by 1 Comment

CBR10Bingo: This Old Thing (The Tempest) and Birthday (Hag-Seed) I’m a big fan of Margaret Atwood’s novels. I haven’t read everything she’s written, but I have a shelf full of her books and have loved all but one (sorry, The Heart Goes Last). I always watch for her new releases, and she’s one of the rare exceptions I’ll make to buy hardcover. When Hag-Seed came out a few years ago, I was all excited and ready to buy, until I looked at the cover blurb […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo