Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

And, almost as one, they murmured: “Yes.”

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

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This book is almost like OG American Gods. Not really, but it does share the kind of mythopoeic qualities of gods and goddesses of other cultures wrapped a kind of metanarrative/ meta-worldview. This is a novel written for children, and I was curious about finding out when it was published (I was listening to the audiobook) and I waited until after I finished. It turns out it was published in 1972. I also wonder if maybe I read this when I was a kid, though I […]

What Happens When We Finally Colonize Mars

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The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury was originally written as separate short stories. After being submitted to his publisher, the publisher told Bradbury to connect the short stories into a cohesive collection about the planet Mars and its subsequent colonization of the planet. Each year I teach “There Will Come Soft Rain” by Bradbury and until reading “The Martian Chronicles” I had no idea the two were related. Granted, the inclusion of “Soft […]

Damn, That Was Good

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CBR 10 BINGO Square: Farenheit 451 (As recently as 2000-2009 it was in the top 100 of banned books, which is so ironic it could have replaced all the verses in Alanis Morisette’s hit.) Best for: Everyone. All of us should read it. In a nutshell: In the future, firemen don’t put out fires – they set them. Specifically, they set books on fire. Worth quoting: “You weren’t hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things really couldn’t be hurt, sine things felt […]

“It Was A Pleasure To Burn” – Fahrenheit 451

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The kid is in high school now, and although her getting older must mean that I, too, must be getting older (yikes!), there are a few perks. One of them is getting to watch her discover things, like some great books that I read when I was around her age. First up is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian masterpiece. The story of a society, perhaps our own, that has decided that the ideas included in books are dangerous, seems eerily prescient. The floor-to-ceiling view […]

24: The Martian Chronicles

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K has chosen The Martian Chronicles for our book club next week, and as soon as one of our titles is announced, I immediately request the book from the library in order to read it and keep up with my book clubs. I had read Fahrenheit 451 many years ago and loved it (I’m due for a re-read, I think), so I was excited to try out The Martian Chronicles. I got the 40th anniversary edition, in which Ray Bradbury explained the history of getting […]

You can almost taste it…

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I am currently halfway through one Stephen King audiobook, most of the way through Lauren Graham’s audiobook, have recently restarted Neverwhere (I was in the mood for comfort food) and also listened to an hour of Outlander (my project for 2017 — listen to all the Outlander novels on audio) at the nail salon today. All of this to say: this will be my last review of 2016, as I’m nowhere near completion on anything else! “I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and […]



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