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 […]
Another “Catcher in the Rye”
This book was painful. I’ve been hearing about Joy Williams frequently in my MFA and she shows up in almost every single faculty presentation. So I decided I should see what all the hype is about and I finally bit the bullet with “The Changeling”…I like Irish Fairy stories…I’m writing a novel threaded around the Changeling idea…it was just reprinted and has a pretty high star rating on Goodreads. Goodreads lies. This felt a lot like “Catcher in the Rye.” There was decent prose, there […]
Nicholson Flew Over the Place Where Birds Roost
I make a “not bucket list” every year of things I’d like to do in the upcoming year and read/watch “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” made the cut, so it was the perfect thing to tackle during a mini Spring Break-staycation. Randle Patrick McMurphy is a gambling con-man in the 196os who trades a stint on a prison work farm for a stay in an asylum. The men’s only asylum has a rich cast of characters who are battling their own personal demons, but […]
If you have sex, you will get pregnant and you will die
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* […]