Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler (1993)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

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I think I distinctly remember this novel as being a clear post-apocalyptic novel when I first read in about 2001 or so. Maybe it was my own age then (20) versus my age now (39) and maybe it was the sense of a different time then (though I don’t know for sure if it was pre or post 9/11), but this felt impossibly far away. Now, approaching the actual date of the novel, it’s so clearly not a post-apocalypse novel and more so either a […]

Orfeo – Richard Powers (2014)

Orfeo by Richard Powers

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The first Richard Powers book I read was Galatea 2.2, and I read it in about 2001 or so. It’s more or less science fiction, but pulled back a little. It struck me later with other books that he does this a lot. He write scientific fiction, where he explores various scientific ideas and concepts within fiction, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes a little mechanically. This book, as you can tell, is a kind of Orpheus retelling. Richard Ells is an experimental composer influenced by the […]

The Souls of Black Folks – W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)

The Souls of the Black Folks by W.E.B. Du Bois

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Just one of those books it’s important to reread from time to time. This book is a lot like rereading James Baldwin essays from the 1950s where it’s refreshing to find clear, precise, and relevant articulations of issues still being discussed. It’s also deeply troubling and depressing how many of these issues are still being discussed. Some stray observations: –the history of the Freedman’s Bureau in the early chapters of this book remind us that white supremacy doesn’t just refuse to give up power but […]

Shit, Actually – Lindy West (2020)

Shit Actually by Lindy West

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This is a genuinely hilarious book that had me cackling repeatedly. I listened to the audiobook, which is worth it alone for hearing Lindy West do the Forrest Gump voices, but is extra charming because it becomes a kind of rifftrax/MST3K by proxy for most of the movies she works her way through. I don’t know if you have to watch all the movies in this book for this book to be as funny as it was for me, but I was fortunate that she […]

1491 – Charles Mann (2005)

1491 by Charles Mann

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This book falls into two categories of books for me. Similar to a book I read recently “The End of the Myth” by Greg Grandin, where I felt like the book is a great overview of a topic and acts as much as a syllabus than a book (James Loewen’s “Lies Your Teacher…” book also covers), and then also books that I don’t know enough about the topic to truly interact with, like Jared Diamond’s books. Looking over the reviews of this book, the ways […]

Studies in Classic American Literature – DH Lawrence (1923)

Studies in Class American Literature by DH Lawrence

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This book is kind of goofy. There’s some funny flexing and cockiness that you might expect from DH Lawrence, and there’s a careful and interesting analysis of American literature. He takes a very cross section and survey perspective on things here: spending time with Benjamin Franklin, Puritan literature, James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne etc). It’s not all that different from books by Edmund Wilson later on. What really strikes me as interesting here is the ways in which American literature is framed in terms of being […]



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