Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Smile Through the Pain

Oblivion by David Foster Wallace

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A boy is so engrossed in his daydreaming that he misses his substitute teacher having a nervous breakdown in front of the class and possibly becoming a danger to the students. A market researcher reflects on his job during the testing of a new chocolate bar by a focus group, while outside a strange figure is climbing up the side of the building. A couple seeks help in a sleep clinic for the, possibly imagined, snoring of the husband. These are just three of the […]

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (2021)

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

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I do think this book is pretty wonderful in a lot of ways. I also thinking it’s a solution in search of a problem in some ways, or maybe a great idea struggling for an audience. The premise here is that George Saunders, along with being a writer, is an MFA professor who teaches creative writing. If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class in college, you are usually treated to someone who clearly sees fiction (or poetry, or nonfiction) from a much different perspective […]

Amazon Originals Presents, a mixed bag.

Faraway by Various

Hush by Various

If the South Had won the Civil War by MacKinlay Kantor

Lost Children by Francesca Lia Block

Trafik by Rikki Ducornet

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A collection of short stories that are either based on fairy tales (like specific ones) or based on fairy tale elements and tropes. So this makes this collection a two-fer in terms of possible issues. The first i s that modern day retellings of fairy tales are very hit or miss. Sometimes they’re great ala Angela Carter and a few others, and sometimes they’re very weak. And the same thing happens in this collection. And of course in any kind of solicited short story collection […]

Some Great, Some Not So, Some Not Even Suspense

A Century of Great Suspense Stories by Stephen King

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I got this one to listen to on drives more than thirty minutes. You can basically hear one short story each way. It is a mixed bag, both in quality and presentation. It should be noted that the audible version of this book only includes seventeen stories, the first half of the book. The rest of the book’s nineteen tales are missing. Maybe the second half is also available as a book on tape. Maybe I’ll check. The stories have been gathered by author Jeffrey […]

How we remember the future

Tales From The Loop by Simon Stalenhag

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I got into this book in the most backward way possible. I was looking for more Phillip Glass music, when I found his score for the show; so then I watched the show; then I bought the book. But it speaks to the quality of it that, as I flipped through the pages and looked at the vignettes and the memory-style stories, I put Glass’s music on and it matched perfectly. You may remember a few years back when a series of paintings of retro-style […]

Bloodchild and Other Stores – Octavia E Butler (1995)

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler

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This is the second time I’ve read this book, and given that thee stories are linked to endnotes and afterwords by Octavia Butler, it’s a valuable book for a lot of reasons, reading the stories themselves, not always. Butler tells us in the opening introduction that for the most part, she’s not a short story writer. She suggests that a lot of short stories either end up becoming novels, or are clearly novel openings that need to be abandoned, and this collection sometimes feels like […]



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