Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Race Rules – Michael Eric Dyson (1996)

Race Rules by Michael Eric Dyson

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I guess I just like Michael Eric Dyson books, and generally always have. I recall him pretty prominently from the days where I’d stay up and watch politically correct and he’d hash it out. In this book, which is from 1996, I’m seeing his most topical book (compared to books about James Baldwin or MLK), in that he’s directly addressing two very prominent events from around this time: the Million Man March and the OJ Verdict. In discussing both, there’s a kind of insider baseball/wonkiness […]

What Truth Sounds Like – Michael Eric Dyson (2018)

What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson

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Taking the last three books by Michael Eric Dyson, there’s a kind of trend that I think is pretty successful for him as a writer, that I appreciate, more so than other anti-racism books (especially those generally written by white people). For one, there’s more direct confrontation of issues with the kind of hesitating “you might not realize this but…” hesitancy of many of those white-written books. Another part that I appreciate is that his books tend to be an act of both witness and […]

Flowering Judas and Other Stories – Katherine Anne Porter (1935)

Flowering Judas and Other Stories by Katherine Anne Porter

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This is the second time I’ve read this collection, and for a few of the stories like “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and “Flowering Judas” half a dozen or more. Katherine Anne Porter has a strange place in American literature, partly because of her placement in time–she was born around the turn of the century–and partly because she only wrote the one novel. She’s an absolute force in terms of the short stories, which predate figures writing somewhat similar stories like O’Connor (to a small […]

Swan Song – Robert McCammon (1987)

Swan Song by Robert McCammon

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I’ve mentioned that I haven’t read a lot of horror novels outside of Stephen King, and while this novel is not exactly horror in the way that not all of King’s novel are either, I find Robert McCammon’s name to be in the same circle as King’s. For the record, I think this way almost exclusively because of the shelves at the local Paperback Exchange in my hometown, which also included Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Dennis Etchison, Dean Koontz, and the like. So […]

Against Interpretation – Susan Sontag (1966)

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

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I don’t think I fully agree with a lot of this book, but I do agree with plenty, and I also don’t think this book “inflicted” anything on us, and in some ways presaged some really awful things to come. I think the most important two things to recognize (at least for me) with this book is that the almost the whole of the book is situated in the two famous essays here: “Against Interpretation” and “Notes on Camp,” which are certainly in a top […]

Patriotic Gore – Edmund Wilson (1962)

Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson

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Edmund Wilson is a sort of classic “Great Man” of American Literary scholarship, alongside Harold Bloom, Lesley Fiedler, Henry Louis Gates, and others. This is his “magnum opus” according to many commentaries I read, unless you believe that one of his other ridiculously long books of scholarship like To the Finland Station or Axel’s Castle happens to be his magnum opus. This book is a long (around 800 pages) history and reading (kind of in the old style) of Civil War literature leading up to, […]



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