Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I Judged This Book By Its Cover

Darkly by Marisha Pessl

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We were shopping for children’s books for The Smallest Niece when Darkly caught my eye across the bookstore.  A riot of magenta (images aren’t doing it justice), it begged to come home for *someone* this Christmas.  A cursory glance at the tag line – “You don’t own the game, it owns you” – revealed it as a perfect top up gift for The Best Nephew in Australia. The Best Nephew In Australia loved The Inheritance Games – hat tip to my sister for raising a […]

“change the dedication / from revolution to revelation”

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl

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At some point as a student I came across French theorist Roland Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), which suggests (in translation) that a text ought to be read as a “tissue of quotations” (instead of a single isolated product of a clearly identifiable authorial intention; I paraphrase and summarise wildly here). I vaguely thought of “tissue” initially as the kind of tissue you’d sneeze into, woven to be flimsy and fragile and disposable. Later, I thought of “tissue” as in the weavings of […]

One of these days, I’m definitely going to have to learn how to spell Marisha Pessl without looking.

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Its become very clear that Marisha Pessl is now a MUST author for me. I loved her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. And while I didn’t have the same immediate feelings for Night Film, that book crept up on me and ended up scaring me more than I thought possible. With Neverworld Wake, Pessl presents her first YA offering, and it offers a combination of the private school privileged world seen in Calamity Physics and a nightmarish view of human nature, similar to […]

Endings are the Second Hardest Part (Right After Titles)

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I really liked this book right up until the last 10% or so. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, so I’ll move the reason down to the end of the post. Night Film is about an investigative journalist, a filmmaker and his daughter; it’s about living each moment of your life fully. It’s about horror movies and why they scare us. Scott McGrath is a disgraced journalist. After comparing filmmaker Stanislas Cordova to Hitler, McGrath was then accused and found guilty of slandering the director. […]

Sovereign. Deadly. (So nearly) Perfect.

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Marisha Pessl arrived in a blaze of glory seven or eight years ago. Her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a critically lauded runaway bestseller. I read it and loved every page of it. Then, she did a Donna Tartt and vanished for aeons. I was about to give up on another novel being published when last year along came her follow up, Night Film. Unlike Tartt, the follow up wasn’t as critically reviled as The Little Friend, but it didn’t attract the universal acclaim its predecessor had. But […]



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