Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

Aesop's Fables by Aesop

Beowulf by Unknown

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules by David Sedaris

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The whole of this post deals with how we tell stories and who we tell those stories to, and what it means to tell THOSE stories in Those ways. Mostly it’s a handful of audiobook I was listening to this wekeend as I played video games and drove around town.   Aesop’s Fables I teach Aesop’s Fables to students, especially my English 12 (collab/special education) class because it allows us to look very directly for the ways in which we connect the words of the […]

A rare find for me: a good short story collection

The Ancient Magus' Bride The Golden Yarn by Kore Yamazaki et al

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So far I’ve really been enjoying the Ancient Magus Bride in its original manga form; I’ve also liked the anime but haven’t seen the whole thing yet. The general gist is that a Japanese teen, Chise, who has no family who wants her, puts herself up for auction. She is purchased by Elias, a non-human mage who wants to train her/ learn about humans from her. Chise has some magical abilities herself, and she fits in well with the mage’s world. It’s a really sweet […]

A Doctor Who twist on classic fairy tales

Time Lord Fairy Tales by Justin Richards and David Wardle

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Time lord fairy tales, like the title succinctly suggests, is a mashup of the Who-niverse and the good old (Western) fairy tales. It puts classical Doctor Who characters into sometimes well-known fairy tales other times stories that either just borrow the structure of fairy tales or that I don’t know. As an adult it was fun to guess along to identify the origin story or the original baddie. However even though the stories are all written by the same author the quality varies wildly. “Heroes […]

Here I wake up because the pregnant woman is touching my face with her fingers.

Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel

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I am wondering after reading this book in what ways we still may or may not have books like this any more. I guess it’s technically fiction — and you won’t get much argument out of me about definitions between fictions and nonfiction and memoir and other related forms because I really do believe that the narrative and literary impulse that produces fiction or more to the point literary writing does not need to worry too much about genre and definitions. But this is a […]

He was in his fifties. He’d wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who’d wasted only a few years.

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

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This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s one of those books that when I read it, I was blown away by it, told everyone about it, bought copies of it for gifts, and made everyone talk about it. I haven’t read it in a decade and it’s more and more clearly a younger reader’s book — the very quote I took for the header of this post suggests this. There’s a kind of void and fear of being young and being […]

Florida Woman! (and friends)

Florida by Lauren Groff

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson

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I didn’t read the About This Book for either of these until way too late which is how I ended up reading two short story collections back to back at the very beginning of a whirlwind overseas trip. I do apologize because while one was vastly superior to the other, they have both fully blurred together in my mind. I also can’t really remember much about either. Perhaps the reason that Florida stands out above The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is that there was enough […]



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