Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Much Tragic. So Drama.

The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales by Thomas Hardy

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Must confess.  In my late teens, I went on a Thomas Hardy binge.  British lit wasn’t new to me, but something about Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd just hit my tragic drama queen teen heart.  Read everyone I could get my hands on, and in those days, there was a fair bit to be found, in school libraries and even public ones.  Inevitably the protagonist (and it was usually a heroine) came to a sad end, and I was there […]

One of the few times I will say to watch the movie first.

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

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I probably chose the wrong time to read this one, as so many of my friends like it quite a bit, even ones who don’t like Thomas Hardy as a writer. But it nicely filled a challenge for Read Harder, and because it’s been on my TBR for over a decade, and it was available on SCRIBD, I did it. And I didn’t not like it, I just found it hard to finish, and it never really caught my attention. I missed soooo much while […]

You can’t escape your own nature.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

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After Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby to a sailor while inebriated, he regrets it deeply. A thorough search for them proves futile, so he swears to abstain from alcohol for the next 21 years and settles in Casterbridge, where he becomes a respected and wealthy citizen. 18 years later his wife and daughter come to the same town looking for him and Henchard’s downfall takes its course. The storyline is nothing special here, it essentially reads like a soap opera. Almost every character […]

If you have sex, you will get pregnant and you will die

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Victorian-era woman who gets her hoe on will get her divine comeuppance.  19th century literature is like an 80s horror movie-you have sex, you die. It doesn’t matter if the woman is cheating on her husband, or straight-up raped by her boss-extramarital hanky-panky must be punished. I decide to combine my reviews of Madame Bovary and Tess of D’Urbervilles, rather than spending two reviews covering a lot of the same ground. *spoilers for some really old books* […]

Misery Porn at its worst.

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The Chancellor and I went to my parents’ house for Christmas this year. To get great tickets, we flew out of our major city’s airport at 7 am. Which meant we had to be there at 5. And be up at 3:30 am. We’re not morning people. And here’s the kicker: it was my 31st birthday. So apparently, my addled brain thought it would be a GREAT idea to start Tess of the D’Urbervilles that morning. Because apparently, my self-hatred knows no bounds. I started […]

“I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding if I could be one without having a husband.”

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I had no idea what this story was about when a friend dragged me to see the new adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd with Carey Mulligan. Thank god she did because I looooooooooved it. To the point where I was almost afraid to read the book. What if it didn’t live up to the movie? FFtMC tells the story of Bathsheba Everdene, a headstrong woman who ends up inheriting and running a Weatherbury farm in Victorian era England. She is very young at […]



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