Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Perhaps every generation passes to the next…an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk’s contents to the young and never open it.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

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CBR15 BINGO: (Bodies, Bodies Bodies square. Deals with the process of aging and death) Annie Dillard’s writing is gorgeous, layered and poetic. I read The Living years and years ago and still, when asked what my favorite books of all time are, it is on the top of that list. I can only remember basic points about the plot but I remember, very vividly, how reading that book made me feel. This is Dillard’s only other work of fiction and, while set in a different […]

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

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I feel like this book gets so much praise and adulation that I can push back on it a little without being too unfair. I grew up a few miles from where this memoir “takes place” so to speak, and I genuinely mean a few miles, like we could ride our bikes there, and did, while only crossing one main road. I didn’t actually know that in the sense that I’ve know about this book for a long time as it’s quite famous and won […]

You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth.

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Living By Fiction – 4/5 Stars This is a very 1980 book. Depending on your specific connection with literary criticism (and its history), you may or may not be aware that the 1980s was a weird and dramatic shift in the field. Because of the dying off of some significant figures, the opening up of the university to the influences of critical theorists, and the rise of identity studies departments, English, which always sort of lagged, went through some attempts to legitimize and re-canonize. This […]



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