Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Frog and Toad - Collected Stories by Arnold Lobel

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J Gaines

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CBR14Bingo – Question: Why are so many Americans obsessed with this book (especially Libertarians and Sovereign Citizens) Common Sense – This is one of those books whose main ideas and arguments I ostensibly know through cultural osmosis. If I had ever read it before, I am less sure, but I have taken a handful of early American classes, so maybe. One of the prevailing ideas that came to me as I read this and thought more about why it holds such a special place in […]

The Plot

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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CBR14Bingo – New — This is both a newish book and an author new to me.   We begin with Jacob Finch Bonner, a character we are told early on who decided that he wanted to be a great writer long before he knew anything about voice or writing or books or anything. The Finch in his name is an affectation, taken from his love for To Kill a Mockingbird. Now 10 years into his writing career, he’s published two novels, one moderately successfully, and […]

Fiction/Poetry Shorts

The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

The Song of Roland by Unknown

Project Kiwayan by Randy Ribay

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The Magic Christian – 3/5 Stars I don’t know almost anything about Terry Southern except he has a great name and he wrote for the movies in addition to fiction. If you’ve seen Dr Strangelove, you’ve seen some of his writing at work, and he was a favorite of Peter Sellers. In addition, he was more or less loosely associated (at the very least in style and tone) to those post-war waywards like Charles Portis and Ken Kesey. This novel begins with Guy Grand, an […]

Plays

The Sound Inside by Adam Rapp

Men's Health by Daniel Goldfarb

Have a Nice Day by Billy Crystal, Quinton Peeples

Coal Country by Jessica Blank, Erik Jensen, Steve Earle

The Vanishing Negative by Aaron Mark

The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy

A Streetcare Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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The Sound Inside – 3/5 Stars Written by Adam Rapp and starring Mary Louise Parker, this play is about a writing professor who had had some very minor success early in her career with a debut novel, and now almost 20 years later finds herself with no second novel, and worse, terminal cancer. In the play she thinks and talks about multiple topics, but the play is shaped around her interactions with a male student, young in the way she was once young, and fragile […]

Rabbit Novels – Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Rabbit Remembered by John Updike

Licks of Love by John Updike

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CBR14Bingo – Body Rabbit is Rich – 4/5 Stars All the Rabbit novels are squarely about two main things: the lives that bodies live and the eclipsing of the white man (according to the white man himself) in American society. In this third novel, which I find to be the most unpleasant of the four (and all are at least mildly unpleasant), Rabbit is around 45 and he’s been working as the manager and head salesman at his now-dead father in law’s car dealership. It […]

Poetry Stuff

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch

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CBR14Bingo – Verse The Hatred of Poetry This book is just fantastic. I’ve never not thoroughly enjoyed any of Ben Lerner’s books (and maybe one day I will read some of his poetry). He takes the topic of why people hate poetry and thinks through the wheres and whys of it — that it’s old, that it’s hard to read, that it’s oblique, and that it’s annoying. But he’s a poet and well, irony and all that. “Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond […]



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