Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“If a book is well-written, I always find it too short”

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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4.5 stars CBR17 Bingo: Black (a book with a black cover) I had completely forgotten that I read and reviewed this book back in 2016. My original review can be found here. My plot summary of the more than 200-year-old novel can be found in my previous review. Nevertheless, my reading experience this time around was different enough from earlier times that I wanted to write about some of my thoughts and observations, not to mention some of the points of discussion that came up during my […]

While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

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You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail. ― Joseph Heller, Catch-22 “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, […]

Things are different in Wales

Ivon by Michael Aylwin

Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

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CBRBingo – Sportsball and People As I read Ivon, I couldn’t help thinking that this would be a much better book if Jasper Fforde had written it.  Fforde is a master of taking a crazy premise and populating it with such skillfully drawn living breathing humans that the setting becomes real. This is Aylwin’s first novel, and he isn’t there yet. In the world of Ivon, sport is everything.  Set in our future, after a series of pandemics that killed off all but the fittest, almost all of humanity […]

In which A Square contemplates the universe

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

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Flatland is broken up into two parts. In the first A Square explains to the reader his universe which is called Flatland, a two dimensional world. There are only two dimensions in Flatland: one that runs North to South and one that run West to East. All women are Lines and there is a separate caste system based around the number of sides one has. In such system, the lowest caste are isosceles triangles, for how can one be worthy of respect if they are […]

“All his life he’d used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe.”

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On a prose level, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed the first two, which were extremely clever and a bit raw. Here, with Patrick sober (for several years, it’s implied), he once again is one among many points of view, just as he was in the first book as a five year old, when his parents’ dinner guests held most of the narrative focus. Here the party is for some duke or other on his birthday, and the Princess Margaret is […]



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