Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Strindberg mansplains it all

Miss Julie by August Strindberg

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In the last season of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the popular lowbrow comedienne Sophie Lennon, played by Jane Lynch, wants to prove her acting chops by starring in a theatre play of Miss Julie.  Despite rehearsal performances that are nuanced, in the actual performance Lennon plays Miss Julie as a variation on her lowbrow alter ego, to crushing reviews.  It turns out that this highbrow/lowbrow collision is one of the main themes of Miss Julie, so Lennon’s portrayal might actually have been a novel approach. […]

Reading the rainbow for CBR Bingo

Butterflies are Free by Leonard Gershe

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Written by Leonard Gershe, who also wrote the script for the Audrey Hepburn film Funny Face, Butterflies are Free is a play that premiered in 1969 with Blythe Danner (Gwyneth’s ma) in one of the starring roles. It was adapted into a 1972 film starring Goldie Hawn and Eileen Heckart, the latter of whom won an Oscar for best supporting actress.  Who knew?!  My background prior to the google search that provided that info was that my parents went to college for performing arts in […]

I’m Just Not That Into Her

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

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This is try number three with Ottessa Moshfegh’s work and I have to finally admit that she’s not an author suited to my tastes, even as I admire her immense talent for writing. She is great at making the banal interesting and describing the internal monologue of the isolated and potentially manic. Her prose is beautiful. I totally get why people like her. But her characters and stories are so relentlessly uninteresting. I would have never imagined a person with this kind of talent could […]

Well, that’s just your opinion, man.

The Seven Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin

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There is no doubt at all that John Ruskin was an odd bird indeed.  But good Lord, the man had Opinions.   In 1848, Ruskin toured northern France with his bride (poor girl), and I assume, earlier Italy.  It was here that he fell in love with (certain examples) of Gothic architecture.  For Ruskin, architecture was the first of the arts, because it was not created by a person, but rather by a culture (his primary examples being cathedrals that took, in some cases, hundreds […]

Men Suck

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

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In one of those “I wish I had all the time in the world” fits I occasionally throw, I wish I could learn Japanese. My aptitude for languages is terrible; I’ve never tried learning anything remotely far east Asian. But I want to do it just to read Natsuo Kirino’s amazing books in their original form. Like her stellar work Out, which was one of the best things I read last year and would have been the best thing I read most other years, Natsuo Kirino […]

Ain’t No Love In the Heart of the City

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley

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Whew. I don’t even really know where to begin with this one. Not because it’s a complex book. On the surface, it’s rather simple: 14 tales of an ex-con trying to make it in the underbelly of south central Los Angeles. No more, no less. No central plot except a man trying to survive. But hell, man, this is a tale of living. James Weldon Johnson once wrote in a poem: “Make me a world.” Walter Mosley does that. I’ve had an interesting journey with […]



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