Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Salvador by Joan Didion

The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion

Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion

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Slouching Toward Bethlehem – 4/5 Stars Turns out that I think that Joan Didion’s essays are much stronger than her novels. I think this will remain a consistency as I read more of each of these works and come to a better understanding about them. This collection, from the mid-1960s traces both American history of this time-period (in a kind of anthropological and political way) and Joan Didion’s own personal history (in a kind of cultural history). We get essays on local civic campaigns to […]

Whatever you remember about an old girlfriend is perfect.

Sam the Cat by Matthew Klam

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I told my wife I might have a little Matthew Klam narrator in me and she was horrified because she had read this book years ago and it helped her to put name and face to the phenomenon of white American men of a certain bent. These are several (fairly long) stories written clearly by a man in his 30s, looking back and thinking about men in their 20s. These men are so deeply in their 20s it’s painful and hurtful to see them acting. […]

Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was.

The Virginian by Owen Wister

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This one of those novels that got talked up in a number of graduate classes I took in American literature, American studies, and other similar courses. I should mention from the start it’s neither an especially good or especially bad novel. Instead, it’s reputation, especially in those classes, comes from it’s kind of “first-ness” and it’s prototypical sense of especially 20th century myths about the West. This book came out in 1902 and the West, as we have it, had already been “closed” by various […]

Journalis Shtamm, whose “Letters from the Provinces” were signed “Etal,” among other pseudonyms, had decided to set out–on the heel of his letters–for Moscow.

Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

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This is a kind of paranoiac nightmare collections of Soviet fables from the 1920s written in Russian and published in the early days of the country. Recently, when I read the Nabokov uncollected nonfiction collection I was pleased to find a very grumpy and critical Nabokov being asked to review a handful of pro-Party Communist literature from the 1920s (and maybe 1930s I forget) and he hated it. The plots and examples he showed unveiled a truly disgusting, servile, craven set of literature. Imagine pro-Trump […]

The Charles Lindbergh farmhouse glowed with bright, orangish lights.

Along Came a Spider by James Patterson

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I’ve never read a James Patterson novel previous to this one and I can really understand why he’s popular. It’s crazy to me, though, how much he made his life and work into an industry. The way he shops out his name for branding and co-writing credits is downright absurd to me. But don’t hate the player and all that. This is the first Alex Cross novel and the lead character is a Washington DC police detective who also was previously a forensic psychologist — […]

Maman died today.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

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Or maybe “Mother died today.” Or maybe “Today, mother died.” Or maybe “Today, maman died.” Or maybe “Mommy died today.” During the quarantine (the incorrect word, I know) I assigned my college composition kids to read The Metamorphosis and one of the things I asked them to do with it is look at the opening line as it’s been translated by multiple different translators. Then I said to put the German sentence into Google translate and see what you get. Because we’re in distance learning, we […]



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