Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer (1948)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

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One of my pseudo-white whales I realized once I got going with it and thought back on my orientation toward this novel. It’s on the MLA top 100, so I bought it once long ago and began reading it and stopped not that far into it. I mentioned this once to a grad school colleague and got yelled at, and didn’t know why or like that. It was my first understanding of that kind of passion that Mailer sometimes inspired in people. He obviously has […]

Gain – Richard Powers (1998)

Gain by Richard Powers

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-So if I were recommending this book, it would come with a warning that a fair amount of this book is rage-inducing and saddening. We have two competing narratives. In one, we get the history of the development of a soap company beginning in the mid-19th century in the Northeast through the late 1990s. This begins with two brothers coming up with a process to mass-produce soap, to reduce the oily residue from glycerine, and then through the Gilded Age’s development of corporations (in the […]

The Five Books of [Robert] Moses – Arthur Nersesian (2020)

The Five Books of [Robert] Moses by Arthur Nersesian

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Given how long some books sit on my shelves before I finally get to them, the fact that I am picking up this 1500 page book only a year after I bought it (and when it was published) and tackling it means something I think. It doesn’t hurt that earlier this year I read The Power Broker for the first time, Robert Caro’s 1200 page book about Robert Moses’s life and career as the (often extra legal) architect of New York. How that basically worked […]

The smell of hospitals in winter And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters

The Road through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

Selected Prose of TS Eliot by TS Eliot

The Burden of Southern History by C Vann Woodward

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The Road through the Wall A novel that reminds me of what I’ve always known, that American suburbs are deeply rotten states. Shirley Jackson earned her fame by writing about small towns, but this novel published around the same time of the The Lottery story collection is a reminder, along with most of those stories, that all parts of the US have a deep cultural rot to them that is not housed in specific places. Those places just have their own flavors. The novel takes […]

My Struggle Part five (Some Rain Must Fall) – Karl Ove Knausgard (2010)

My Struggle Part Five by Karl Ove Knausgard

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For the UK title:   This fifth volume of Knausgard’s novel closely picks up after the fourth. Here we find young Karl Over in love with a girl who he has spent exactly 20 minutes with. They will both be students in Bergen in the fall when she begins university and he begins a one-year writing course. He’s 19 and fresh off his teaching job in the country. He’s only 19, so the writing course seems to be a big deal and he definitely feels […]

The Plague – Albert Camus (1947)

The Plague by Albert Camus

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I can’t imagine that anyone who read this novel before 2020 was very much surprised at what came next. This is a novel about plague reaching an Alergian port city, carried by the fleas that inhabit rats. Dead rats start showing up in tremendous numbers around the city, and even though the evidence is clear, the city is small to move on precautions that will save lives. Our narrator is watching this occur and this novel is presented almost as commentary and reportage on the […]



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