Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Passion

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

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This was the first Jeanette Winterson I read, and I remember reading it nonstop at work in college. I really did enjoy it, but I am now thinking that it was given to me by someone I had a crush on also had a big effect. It’s a truly wondrous book in so many ways, especially because it’s wildly inventive and beautifully written. The novel opens with our first passion (well, two passions). Here’s the opening sentence: “It was Napoleon who had such a passion […]

O’Neill-o-rama

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill

Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O'Neill

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

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Long Day’s Journey into Night  – 5/5 O’Neill wrote this play about 15 years before he died in 1953. It wasn’t published and produced until after he died, and it’s considered by many to be his masterpiece. That rings more or less true mostly because of the close ties to his own experiences, and for me, the way that the play feels more grounded than some of his other plays. He cast several of his plays against a framework of Greek tragedy, which like Greek […]

A Delicate Balance

A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee

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This is a play by Edward Albee, and boy does it feel like it. Agnes, a woman in her later fifties, opens the play with a discussion of possibly losing her mind. This is taken as sport by her husband Tobias, and her sister Claire who lives in the house with them. One of the prevailing motifs in the play is about alcoholism, but specifically discussions about whether or not someone’s behavior is past the line of alcoholism, or if alcohol abuse might be symptom […]

Othello

Othello by William Shakespeare

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You might not realize this, but very well-known movie “O” is actually based on an obscure 17th century play called “Othello”. I find this one of Shakespeare’s oddest tragedies, alongside Romeo and Juliet because for whatever reason, the ones in which someone is looking for social mobility, usurpation, or some other high office seeking or in the case of King Lear, already being king, feel less Shakespeare to me. I also think it’s weird because for whatever, people don’t talk about it as much as […]

A Childhood: Biography of a Place

A Childhood by Harry Crews

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I went back and looked at when this was originally published, which was 1978. I was wondering about this because of one, how this situates within Harry Crews’s writing career and two, how it situates within the broader publishing world of a certain kind of Southern US literature. The memoir is harrowing and amazing. It’s called “Biography of a Place” because so much of the memoir is not about Crews at all, and most is not told from memories, but of memories of being told. […]

Dark Tales, wooo-ooo

Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

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This collection of short fiction by Shirley Jackson is not all previously uncollected or unpublished, but if you have a copy of The Lottery and Other Stories, there are no repeats for this one. About a third of these stories are found in the Library of America collection though. The stories here are called Dark Tales, and minus the memoir pieces, all Shirley Jackson stories are dark stories. What sets off most of these stories is the intrusion of darkness into otherwise ordinary lives. Sometimes […]



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