Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Mystery I Really Didn’t Need to Have Solved

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Oh my goodness, I really loved this.  Not even sure what genre to put it in.  Fantasy, I guess, but also alternate realities, so maybe science fiction?  Anyhow, that’s a bookshop owners’ dilemma and not mine, so I will just classify it as wonderful. Piranesi, a young man, has been the sole living inhabitant of the House as far back as he remembers.  The House is multi-leveled, multi-winged, and open to the air, the weather, and the sea.  Its vast rooms contain only massive statues […]

“May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty.”

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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In one word: Strange Y’all. I am straight-up mad at Susanna Clarke. HOW DARE SHE BE SO TALENTED AND CLEVER. I was delighted and amazed by her hefty debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and picked this one up on the recommendation of many people. It’s a slim and unassuming-looking book but she packs more creativity and strangeness into it than should be possible in so few pages. It might be the weirdest book I’ve ever read, giving Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” some stiff […]

And to top it all off, faeries are dicks

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

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“I was told you were dead!” he cried. “I was sure you would be.” There was a pause. Both men felt faintly embarrassed. The ranks of dead and wounded stretched away upon all sides as far as the eye could see. Simply being alive at that moment seemed, in some indefinable way, ungentlemanly. In 2020 and 2021, I dove headlong into fantasy and scifi. As the pandemic raged, I couldn’t tear myself away from magicians, witchers, mistborns, kandra, grisha, alien invasions, teenagers trapped in a […]

Hard to explain this book but I have tried to recommend it!

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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I will admit that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has been a bit of white whale for me for a while–it’s just hard for me to get into the book, even though I want to read it and I want to like it! Plus it was gifted to me by a friend, which means I feel bad for not reading it? (side bar: giving books as gifts is so fraught) So you can imagine my trepidation to try another of Clarke’s works, even though this […]

Like the circles that you find in the windmill of your mind

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Cbr13bingo Rec’d, Bingo #8 Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi has been reviewed about a dozen times on the Cannonball Read, first by tiny_bookbot and most recently by Debcapsfan. Every review of this book has been 4 or 5 stars. Published in 2020, Piranesi was nominated for the Nebula Best Novel and won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is an astonishing fantasy novel about the world of the mind and the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. I must say that while I thought […]

And then they all died

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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CBR Square- Mythic I was talking to my husband about Piranesi after he asked me what I thought about it and I told him I loved it but I didn’t want to spoil any of it so I didn’t know what to say. He told me to just say “and then all died.” Sorry. Piranesi is a slow building mystery where the main character is in a House by the sea full of statues that is built like a maze. The main character, who doesn’t remember […]



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