Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I really liked reading “Lord of the Flies”

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

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I’m not sure what I expected when I started reading this novel, but I was actually very surprised by my reading experience. Pleasantly so.  Lord of the Flies is such a cultural touchstone, and I thought I knew what I was in for: wild boys, a conch shell, something about Piggy and Ralph, etc. But I was amazed at how much more nuanced and interesting this book is than I anticipated. I think we all know the story to some extent. Several young boys survive […]

It was early spring, and the second day of our journey.

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

The Beggar by Naguib Mahfouz

The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz

Autumn Quall by Naguib Mahfouz

Deed of Trust by Claudia Allen

Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts by JMG le Clezio

Fire Down Below by William Golding

Cult X by Fuminori Nakamura

The Long Valley by John Steinbeck

Being the Change by Sara K Ahmed

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The Kreutzer Sonata – 4/5 Stars This is a strange murder story by Leo Tolstoy in which we find a man who murdered his wife for having an affair (having caught her in the act) and then in acquitted. I am not spoiling this story for you at all because all of this is told to you in the first few pages. But what comes out of this telling is more about the nature of his crime and how he found himself in the position […]

I signalized my birthday by giving myself a present since no one else seemed inclined to!

Close Quarters by William Golding

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The second novel of the Ends of the Earth Trilogy and the sequel to Rites of Passage, who ironic title belies how sinister that novel is. This novel is also quite sinister, but in a somewhat different way. These novels, so far the two of them at least, hide in plain sight as the kind of seagoing novels that a lot of British writers are well-known for. This starts off like it’s a Henry James or EM Forster novel and then it slowly turns. We find […]

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

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This is a strange book for me because in some very important ways, I think this book is absolutely brilliant and a master class in style. But also, I don’t really like it. The point of view in this novel is where the master stylist at work comes through. This is a book with zero supernatural elements to it, but because the point of view is so closely linked to the internalizations of the world by the various boys whose consciousness the novel follows, we […]

In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another.

Rites of Passage by William Golding

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This is the 1980 Booker Prize winning novel by the eventual Nobel Prize laureate William Golding. Interestingly, he’s one of I think four laureates to win the prize, with the most recent winner Kazuo Ishiguro as well as Nadine Gordimer and VS Naipaul. He’s also known primarily for writing Lord of the Flies in the early 1950s, his first novel. I ended up mostly liking this one. It’s about a ship voyage from England to Australia, called the Antipodes here, in the early 19th century, […]

Stands up as allegory, less so as a novel

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Bingo Square: Fahrenheit 451 Since I switched school districts (and states) between 9th and 10th grade, I ended up reading Lord of the Flies twice in high school English class.  And I despised it both times. Despite that, I noticed at some point that it is a novel I refer to more than some novels I actually enjoyed in school so I had been meaning to do a reread for a while.  After I chose it for the Fahrenheit 451 square, I realized it could […]



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