Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Mr. McGill?” Mardi Bitterman said over the intercom that connects her desk at the front of our office complex to mine at the far end.

Trouble is what I Do by Walter Mosley

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This is the second Leonid McGill novel I’ve read and I don’t really remember much about the first one. McGill is a contemporary detective, a former boxer, still in shape, dangerous with his hands and weapons, knows everyone, and works in various undergrounds in various capacities. What’s strange about this book is that it is considerably shorter than the other McGill books. In addition, what’s strange about contemporary detective novels is that the character generally has to contend with modern technology in some way. And […]

On the first day of human sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt…

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta

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This is yet another Tom Perrotta novel I read. I happened to like this one just fine, without any real feelings of warmth or excitement about it. It’s structured a lot like his other novels, where we follow a handful of intermixed characters through the narrative understanding more about them and how they interact throughout. The premise here starts with a high school health teacher kind of sarcastically, but honestly answering a student’s question during sex-ed about oral sex. The question, isn’t oral sex the […]

The argument started a good twenty miles from Ormeshadow.

Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma

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As a “fantasy” novel, this is relatively spare and quite subtle. This novel reminds me a lot of books like Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which traces a post-Arthurian England veiled in a kind of mist like memory erasure, as well as the recent Max Porter book Lanny, which traces a boy’s disappearance in a small town north of London, while also tracking a local monster (who may or may not exist). This book is also a lot like the kind of rural idyllic novels of the 1800s and […]

Tears filled his eyes.

The Search by Naguib Mahfouz

Fountain and Tomb by Naguib Mahfouz

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Two books! These are two novellas by the Nobel Prize winning Egyptian writer (writing in Arabic) one from the 1960s and 1970s. He’s most famous for a handful of “modern” Egyptian novels like Adrift on the Nile as it tracks a kind of metropolitan Egyptian culture, his trilogy of contemporary 20th century novels — The Cairo Trilogy. He also wrote a less well-known trilogy of “ancient Egypt” as well. The Search This short novel begins with a young man talking with his single mother about this unknown […]

Raman’s was the last house in Ellaman Street; a little door on the back wall opened, beyond a stretch of sand, to the river.

The Painter of Signs by R.K. Narayan

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This is a short, late novel by the Indian writer RK Naryan. Previous to this one I read two of his early novels from the 1930s, one that I absolutely loved and thought was wonderful — Swami and Friends — and one that I did think was very good, but less beloved — The Dark Room. This novel is not really a lot like either. We begin by meeting Raman, a sign painter who works in the small village of Malgudi (Narayan’s go-to fictional town ala Yoknapatawpha […]

the summer is filled with the little “ffft, ffft” sounds of childrens’ mouths breaking the surface of swimming pools

The End of the World by Don Hertzfeldt

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I don’t know what your memories or associations with Don Hertzfeldt is, but he was one of the biggest and most important touchstones for me in terms of humor and college. Others include The Royal Tenenbaums, Homestarrunner, and a few others. I love Don Hertzfeldt and his brand of weird, dark, absurd, but ultimately not hurtful humor has always been the perfect distillation of the last 20 years of (good) humor in comedy. This book is very similar and is a 100 or more pages of […]



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