Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Who is really lost here?

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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And the saga of my conflicted feelings for audiobooks continues. With a highpoint, admittedly, but conflicted those feelings still are. I spend a lot of time in front of screens for work, reading documents etc., my eyesight has suffered this year and since I, for some odd reason, cannot bring myself to cancel my audible subscription, I’ve decided to try listening to audiobooks before bed. And boy does that work! 15 minutes in and I’m fast asleep! It stretched out my “reading” time for this […]

Ten mostly good fiction books

Normal people by Sally Rooney

Conversations with friends by Sally Rooney

The amateur marriage by Anne Tyler

The pull of the stars by Emma Donoghue

Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Holes by Louis Sachar

The princess bride by William Goldman

The legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Normal people by Sally Rooney I’d watched the series before I read the book and yet the series didn’t put me off reading it. I suffered through it, just as I suffered through this book about Marianne and Connell. Two kids who go to the same school, and then later on to the same university, their lives entwined. We witness their strange dance as they struggle to communicate plainly with each other and fail again and again. Marianne is a broken person. Connell is sort […]

“There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.”

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Sometimes, when I’m enjoying the world of a book, I start reading slowly and lingering over each passage because I don’t want it to end. Piranesi is just over 250 pages, but I savoured it over the course of two weeks. Susanna Clarke is something of a magician herself. I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for its atmosphere, likable and/or vivid characters, and subtle humour, and although Piranesi is a completely different sort of book, I loved it for the same reasons. Every single review I have […]

I have many thoughts, for which I’m having trouble finding words

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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I didn’t know Susanna Clarke had a new novel until I spotted it on a trip to my favorite local bookstore. So many of us read and loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, with its elaborate plot, beautifully crafted characters, and Dickensian story-telling, I wondered how her new novel, so slim, would compare. Piranesi is as different from Jonathan Strange as it is equally wonderful. Piranesi lives in a house with many rooms, great halls, long corridors, and labyrinths. The lower level provides him with […]

Living breathing mythology

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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If you’re dauted by the idea of Piranesi because Susanna Clarke’s other major novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell rolls in at just over a solid thousand pages, you can relax. By her standards, this is a novella and, unsurprisingly, a very very good one. Clarke creates my favorite kind of worlds, the ones just a degree or two separate from ours, and Piranesi is another master class. Piranesi lives in a large house he has never been able to fully explore, but that he documents thoroughly because […]

On being alone and loving it, but also loving people

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Piranesi lives in a house with many halls, with an Ocean trapped within. There are infinite statues, and birds and fish, and the remains of 13 people who had previously lived there. He lives in isolation save for the Other, who named him and spends one hour, twice a week with him, to talk of his scientific observations. The House is the only place Piransi knows, and he has lived there from the beginning of time. But the arrival of 16, as in the 16th […]



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