Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Everybody: A Book About Freedom

Everybody by Olivia Laing

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This looks like a collection of essays, and in many ways it reads like one, but it’s more of a kind of topography study of the life and work of Wilhelm Reich, the people who directly and indirectly influenced, how his ideas and life shaped the modern world, and the different areas that this leads us to. It’s also a personal reflection of gender and experience. The title is of course a pun, and the subtitle “A Book about Freedom” has multiple meanings to it. […]

The Trick is to Keep Breathing

The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway

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I’d never heard of this novel or this novelist, but this book is very good. Our narrator is a 27 year old Scottish woman who works as a school teacher. I say works as a school teacher because she seems pretty sure she is not long for that job and is showing all the signs of burnout. She is spiraling when the novel opens but it’s not clear why initially. That later becomes clear but what we do know is that she is basically counting […]

Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

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I am rereading this (and will likely get around to other Michael Chabon books later) and for the most part I really enjoyed the reread. This is a second novel that is so far superior to a first novel that there was always the clear indication of talent. And even as a second novel there’s a precociousness here. Chabon was 32 or so when this was published, but the narrator is a burnt-out contemporary novelist working at a university who is somewhere around page 2000 […]

Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

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There’s a running joke at my job about this book. Most teachers there hate it and almost all kids hate it. And yet, people keep teaching it. I labeled an email “Another thought I had about Ethan Frome” to a colleague and then cut and pasted the entire text of the novella to them in the body of the email, which should be fun if I ever get FOIAed. Anyway, I love this book and think it’s really good. I also understand why kids don’t. […]

White Noise

White Noise by Don Delillo

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This is another reread. I first read this book in 2003 or so when I was in college, and while I enjoyed a lot about it, I can’t say I understood much beyond the weird story. There’s a Beckett-like element at play within this novel, as so many of the fat-rendered glut of modern life is broken down into elemental language that gives us both narration and dissection at the same time. It’s like a mid-century suburban novel written by a robot. Our narrator is […]

Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

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Patti Smith voice: Horses, horses, horses, horses, horses….. This book is amazing and more people should read it. I recently decided to tackle a few of my literature gaps, and 18th century British literature is probably my major one. I could say 17th century too, but I have read enough Shakespeare and other contemporaries plus later poets to at least appear respectable. I can ask questions at the every least. Anyway, I recently picked up a Tobias Smollett book and while it was going okay […]



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