Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Delight in Violence for sure, but not entirely the book I was looking for

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

by Leave a Comment

There were things I liked about this book (the fashion! the sombre realities of colonialism!) but they were largely outweighed by clunky writing that’s simultaneously too verbose and too brief. Not to malign youth, but I upon reaching the author bio and seeing that Gong is currently a student at UPenn I definitely had a moment of “ah, yes, makes sense.” These Violent Delights is not, as I initially thought, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet in 1920s Shanghai. It’s obviously not not that (all the characters make an […]

A novel of grief

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell

by 6 Comments

This could very well end up as one of my favorites for 2021. O’Farrell’s novel imagines the death of William Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet and the grief the envelops the family as a result. I could not put this book down, it is so beautifully written and heart wrenching. While Shakespeare is a character in the novel (never named but obviously him), the main character is Agnes, his wife and mother to Hamnet, Hamnet’s twin Judith and Susannah. It is mainly through her eyes that […]

I take an odd sort of comfort in knowing that things in America have been just as bad, if not worse, than they are right now.

Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro

by Leave a Comment

The 2016 election: we will eventually be far away from that time, but while we wait to heal we will continue to publish works – everything from tweets to films- about how it shaped our current situation. In 2017, the Delacorte Theater  staged a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park . Shakespeare had been done live in Central Park for years. Julius Caesar had been performed steadily around the world since it debuted in 1599. Caesar has taken on many depictions throughout the […]

“Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, In my corrupted blood.”

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro

by 10 Comments

The bile, the fire, the vitriol; do we understand now what King Lear meant when he assaulted his eldest daughter with these words? I certainly did not. I took it as an insult, sure, but I did not know the deeper meaning. Recently, I was driving to work and I heard James Shapiro on NPR. He was a guest because, despite the fact that he was promoting his latest title, a lot of people have been making a lot of headway with the statement that […]

“We all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.”

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

by 4 Comments

There is a lot to say about Shakespeare, but there is not a lot to know. Bill Bryson, everyone’s favorite kindly uncle, lays the facts bare while gently chiding all of the (mostly bonkers) “hopeful suppositions” that have been presented as facts by well-meaning and often obsessed fans, historians, and scholars. Bryson, himself an acolyte at the altar of Shakespeare, paints a bright and brisk portrait of the man that we know to be Shakespeare. We know very few things about him; there are only […]

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

by Leave a Comment

I thought I remembered much more of Station Eleven than I did; I had remembered it as a story of Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony and several scrapes with some religious extremists. I remembered Jeevan in the fortress of his brother’s tower. I remembered skulking through rotting schools and all-encompassing trees. What strikes me now is how immediately the sense of dread starts to kick in; there is no slow build; a statement about everything falling to pieces kicks in within the first chapter. Maybe […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo