Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

We tell ourselves stories to live.

The White Album by Joan Didion

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So I hadn’t read the title essay from this collection before, and while I had heard the famous opening line, I didn’t know the broader context of her meaning. What sounded trite quoted, makes a lot more sense in full (as these things happen). The telling of stories in this case is a kind of narrative (and even myth) making and understanding about the contexts of our lives. The storytelling part is the way to make sense of (even when lying) of a particular moment […]

July 20, 1991. Picked up my college diploma at the service window of the registrar’s office.

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

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A subtle and slightly chaotic, or more so frenetic novel from the Taiwanese writer Miaojin Qui, this book is structured as several covert notebooks. The style of the novel is confessional, but also fable-like at times, with the “crocodile” in the title acting throughout as a metaphor for Queer people living in the wider context of the writer. We have more than one storyline going at once as we kind of have the narration of a small group of Queer people in Taiwan facing both […]

The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese.

Collected Stories by William Faulkner

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I think a lot of people end up reading a little bit of Faulkner (a novel or three) and I feel like most people end up reading “A Rose for Emily” in college (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs-bVMs1LKU&ab_channel=TheZombiesMusic) but there’s a lot of hidden gems in this 900 page collection of his short fiction (there’s also a volume of uncollected fiction that I might end up looking through at some point). He was one of those writers, who for about 35 years or so was just writing constantly. Not […]

My special circle included Edna Ferber, one of the most prolific writers of her time–a scold, a snob, a low-profile dominatrix whose corseted asperity was never far from busting out.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Good Bye to All That by Robert Graves

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston

Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Harriet Tubman by Ann Petry

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This post with multiple reviews represents a clearing of the cache of backlogged Audible audiobooks (mostly quite short) that I am trying to work my way through. My audiobook TBR is significantly longer than my paper book TBR, which is almost always less than 10 at a time.   Can Your Ever Forgive Me? – 4/5 Despite the party line from English teachers about plagiarism and fraud and academic honesty, I do love a good con artist. And literary con artists have always had a […]

I hesitated a long time before writing a book about woman.

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

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Only mostly knowing what I was getting into with this, I was surprised to learn about the translation (into English) history of this book which cut huge parts of the book out, renamed sections into meaningless terms, and worse, because of the translator’s ignorance of philosophy, rendered much of the philosophical language in the book useless through a flattening or approximation of the terms, when precision was almost certainly embedded in the difference. (I am thinking of the various ways in Heidegger that “desire” gets […]

Bobby Garfield’s father who been one of those fellows who starting losing their hair in their twenties and are completely bald by forty-five or so.

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

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Maybe’s it’s because I’ve been watching Cobra Kai, and maybe it’s just because it’s my childhood, but for two weeks after reading this, I’ve been singing this song over and over: https://youtu.be/swo51-CG9Ss Despite all claims that this is a collection of stories, I would call it a novel. The stories are linked, but so many novels tell different parts of the story in different voices, with different tones, and differently connected ideas and themes. If A Visit from the Goon Squad or Cloud Atlas are […]



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