Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Archives for December 2021

The Gay Place – Billy Lee Brammer (1961)

The Flea Circus by Billy Lee Brammer

Room Enough to Caper by Billy Lee Brammer

Country Pleasures by Billy Lee Brammer

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This is a collection of three novellas first published in 1961 by a former aide to Lyndon Baines Johnson long before he was president. He was never the governor of Texas, but a senator and house representative before he was vice-president. This book to me feels like an inverse to All the King’s Men, where a political figure (framed off of Huey Long) is a center to riff on Souther identity and history more than the politics of the day. Here, I think there’s a lot […]

Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller (1934)

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

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(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_of_Cancer_(novel)) I guess it’s fair to ask the question is this book mysoginistic, about mysogny, about a mysognistic character or some combination of all three. I think it’s got to be all three in varying degrees. I can imagine for a lot of people, reading this novel felt fairly ilberating when it came out and then when it finally came out. And while, sure there’s plenty of graphic sexual content, what stands out to me more than anything in reading it now, especially at […]

As the Romans do

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

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I love historical fiction, it’s my thing and this often gets touted as the first “modern” historical novel, so I of course was very curious. Started this last year in English, but intelligently put the book in the storage room with the rest of my on-hold life, found it in one of the free book cases in German though and finished it. Except, as I’ve learned while looking for pics for this review, I most likely read the condensed German translation that includes Claudius The […]

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren

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If you spoke 20 languages, you could speak to half of the world’s population in their mother tongue and at least communicate with an additional 25%. In this book, the linguist Gaston Dorren dedicates one chapter to each of these 20 languages, and explores some of their characteristics and oddities. The book starts with the language with the fewest speakers, which is Vietnamese, and progresses to the one with the most, English. Dorren always provides some general information on each language first, only to then […]

The East German Harry Potter for goth kids

Krabat by Otfried Preußler

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One of my favourite books in middle school, reread it here in my exile at my mum’s place and while it clearly is for children (well..), it’s as deliciously dark as I remember. In the early 18th century, Krabat, a 14-year old Wendish beggar boy (check out what that people is, you’re in for a cool history/ethnology lesson) finds himself called to a lonely mill in the middle of the woods. He starts an exhausting apprenticeship, where the mysterious miller doesn’t just teach him and […]



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