Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Wallace Stegner (1)

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

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“Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I awake.” Wallace Stegner lived until his mid-80s and published some autobiographical writing before he died. I have to imagine it’s great because a) I have never read anything from him that wasn’t great and b) this novel proves how strong his writing was at least until his late 70s. This novel is primarily narrated by Larry Morgan, an oft-published novelist […]

Gore Vidal (7); Jan Berenstain (1-2); Michael Berenstain (1-2)

Clouds and Eclipses by Gore Vidal

The Berenstain Bears Brother Bear Favorites by Jan Berenstain; Michael Berenstain

The Berenstain Bears Sister Bear Favorites by Jan Berenstain; Michael Berenstain

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Clouds and Eclipses In general I tend to avoid collected stories from celebrated or beloved authors under the following circumstances: 1) they aren’t really known for short stories; 2) the stories are almost exclusively from when they were very young. Some obvious  exceptions occur. Philip Roth’s stories in Goodbye Columbus are all very good, two being some of the best writing he ever did. But Gore Vidal is known primarily for two things: novels and essays. He did some other things too, sometimes very well […]

Milan Kundera (1)

The Joke by Milan Kundera

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“So here I was. Home again after all those years.” This is Milan Kundera’s first novel, and of all the one’s I’ve read it’s more or less the most straightforward. It’s not straightforward, but the conditions of the plot are. We meet Ludvik in the opening pages returning home to a small town in Moravia some seventeen years since he’s last been there. We know something has defined this return in ways that have complicated it, but we’re not year sure how. We also learn […]

Robin McKinley (1)

The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

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“She scowled at her glass of orange juice.” Robin McKinley is not one of those writers I ever read when I was younger, so I don’t have any in-born fondness for her. Which is perfectly fine because from the outset of this novel, I really enjoyed it. It’s a fantasy novel that begins in a far flung post on the edge of a kingdom. Our protagonist, Harry, has been sent to the post to live with her brother after her parents have died. She’s to […]

Louis Auchincloss (1)

The Style's the Man by Louis Auchincloss

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The full title of this book is “The Style’s the Man: Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal, and Others” and there’s lots of others. In fact, the essays here about William Gaddis, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and the failures of Henry James’s theater career are the more interesting of the essays here, because of the more obscurity of the subjects. This is a small collection of literary essays by the (mostly) novelist and lawyer Louis Auchincloss. It’s exactly the kind of book I really enjoy about literature, […]

Monica Ali (1)

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

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“An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen’s life began–began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly–her mother, Rupban, felt an iron fist squeeze her belly.” This is a 2003 novel from the writer Monica Ali, which was nominated and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It lost to a bad book, but I also don’t think it was the best remaining book. Anyway! The novel begins with Nazneen, a Bengali woman living in Dhaka. She finds out that her father […]



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