So my first ever Cannonball review and boy I wish it didn’t have to be this book. One of the things I want to achieve with my cannonball is to reawaken my love of reading. As a teenager through to my early years at college I loved reading but somewhere along the way, like an old friend, I lost touch with my passion for books. Don’t get me wrong I still read a couple of books a year usually on holiday but that side of […]
10% Useful
10% Happier is, like Shonda Rhimes’ Year of Yes or Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, part self-help book and part memoir. In fact, the first 80+ are essentially a chronicle of Dan Harris’s life as he rises through the ranks of broadcast journalism, becomes addicted to cocaine and ecstasy, and eventually has a panic attack on live television. It’s mildly entertaining, behind-the-curtain stuff, and it serves to frame his journey toward mindfulness and meditation, but it’s not especially useful if you’re hoping, as the extremely long […]
–We’re some family all the same, wha’.
This novel is part two of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy, which starts off with The Commitments and closes with The Van. In this novel, we meet the Rabbitte family half a generation earlier from where we started in the previous novel. So to call it a sequel is right and not right and to call it a prequel is right and not right. My understanding is that the third book moves backward in this same fashion. If you liked The Commitments I am certain you’re going to like this […]
Ken Loach by way of Faulkner
Last Orders is about a group of men tasked with taking their friend’s ashes to the seaside. Not a truly novel concept, but well executed through some quality storytelling and narrative focus. This novel has several different narrators, spans multiple timelines, and deals with the inner workings of the type of characters who could too easily play to type or be too guarded or closed off to see their emotional core. The novel starts in a pub. Jack, the master butcher, has died. He […]