Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Edna Ferber

So Big by Edna Ferber

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“Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him. He had literally to fight his way free of it. From So Big (of fond and infantile derivation) it had been condensed into Sobig. And Sobig DeJong, in all its consonantal disharmony, he had remained until he was a ten-year-old schoolboy in that incredibly Dutch district southwest of Chicago known first as New Holland and later as High Prairie. At ten, by dint of fists, teeth, copper-toed boots, and temper, he earned the right to […]

Ernest Hemingway

By Line Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway

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“Hemingway’s literary apprenticeship was served in journalism, and his later work in the field earned him money and sent him to places where he wished to be. Yet his enthusiasm, his compassion, and his imagination made such writing far more than just timely stuff. Some readers will no doubt view the material as rounding out the Hemingway record; others, it is to be hoped, will regard it simply as among the best newspaper and magazine reporting available in our troubled times. —William White, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway […]

Ray Bradbury

The October Country by Ray Bradbury

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“Aimee watched the sky, quietly. Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.” The opening story and a few of moments of the introductory material for this collection tell you a bit of where we’re headed. In general, these are listed as “macabre” […]

Meiko Kawakami

Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kawakami

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“If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.” This is two novels packaged in one book: an original short novella, and a longer sequel. They are not exactly sequels but they doo cover a lot of the same ground thematically, but more importantly, the three narrators — a mother and daughter in the first novel, and then the sister/aunt in the second, are all from the same family, so they have a shared history, even […]

Smalls

The Bend of Luck by Maria Hoey; Peter Hoey

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The Bend of Luck “Luck occurs naturally in the physical world.” This is graphic novel from 2022, and you can see from the opening line that the basic premise of the book is that luck occurs naturally in the world. What does this mean exactly? Luck is elemental here, a kind of gaseous form that dissipates in the air, but can retain its form in liquid and other materials. The novel begins with the formation of this element, taking us through millions of years of […]

Theodore Dreiser

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

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“Dusk—of a summer night. And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.”   One of the more interesting things about this novel is that it came out in 1925, a few months after The Great Gatsby. I don’t think it’s likely, but I would be curious to know if Dreiser made any changes to this text in response. The two books are not hugely similar in terms […]



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