Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Archives for December 2021

Shirley Jackson Stuff – Shirley Jackson

Letters of Shirley Jackson by Shirley Jackson

The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

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Letters of Shirley Jackson – 5/5 Stars A few years ago I read the Collected Letters of Ralph Ellison. One of the very many exciting things about this collection was my learning that he was close friends with Stanley Edgar Hymen and by extention Shirley Jackson. This leads to some various exchanges in that collection that show just how generous of spirit Ralph Ellison often was (and how petty he could sometimes go). This collection has the same set of joys as that colleciton but […]

Philip Roth stuff (I know, I know!)

The Counterlife by Philip Roth

The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth

The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

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The Counterlife – 4/5 Stars Philip Roth seemingly spent his 1980s making further sense or at least writing about what it means to be Jewish, not just in the US, which many of his 50s, 60s, and 70s books dealt, but what it meant to be Jewish in the world. The Counterlife specifically helps to sort out, not necessarily the answer to that question, but to clarify and state precisely the question itself. I am looking back though now, actually to see exactly when the […]

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Within a Budding Grove) – Marcel Proust (1913)

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust

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Book two in Proust and like the first book for me, this is an audiobook listened to over Winter Break mostly while I did yardwork and played video games. I imagine if I told Proust this he would say: “Why are you speaking in English?” “What’s with your weird clothes” “What’s video games?” Anyway, we are older now and love is in the air. Specifically the love of a young girl? Maybe? There were a lot of familiar thoughts happening in this book for me. […]

How could I pass this up?

You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe

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You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but sometimes the cover makes you laugh and then you decide you should read it. That was the case with You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe. I saw it on NPR’s Best Books of 2020 List and laughed out loud. My interest was also piqued because I’ve recently been exposed to some George Washington history from both Hamilton the musical and Alexander Hamilton the book. Two other things drew me to this book. First, it is written by a woman, which seemed […]

This was fun

First Comes Like by Alisha Rai

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I enjoyed Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai, and then I got sucked in to Rai’s next book when the publisher put the beginning of First Comes Like (2021) at the end of Girl Gone Viral. It was an intriguing beginning and I immediately got sucked in. Jia Ahmed is a beauty expert and influencer. She took the jump and moved to Los Angeles in order to further her career, and that has been her primary focus for quite some time. But then she received a direct message from Dev Dixit. […]

In which I have to repeatedly recall how to spell labyrinth.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi

A Red Death by Walter Mosley

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan

The Confusions of Young Master Torless by Robert Musil

The Human Comedy by William Saroyan

Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

The Crystal World by JG Ballard

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Labyrinth – 3/5 stars Don’t be fooled by the weird claim on the cover of this book that it’s similar to The Da Vinci Code. It’s not except that this book came out in a time where people were very much trying to capitalize on the success of that novel. The result was some very bad copycats from a novel I love, for how exceedingly silly and dumb it is. I don’t think this novel is among my favorite but it’s so very different from […]



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