Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Beautiful reads

Seeker of the Truth: Kailash Satyarthi’s Fight to End Child Labor by Srividhya Venkat

A Song For August: The Inspiring Life of Playwright August Wilson by Sally Denmead

Love of the Half-Eaten Peach by Lee Wind

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I debated if I should write a review about three books I only read as samples. Yet, I realized that they are must know about and I do not think they will have any surprises when they finally come out.  All were read via online samples of the picture book. In mid-late July 2024 we will see Seeker of the Truth: Kailash Satyarthi’s Fight to End Child Labor. Srividhya Venkat’s book was the one that had the smallest sample, but I was hooked. Starting as […]

Can I live?

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There’s nothing true about this play that I didn’t say about the others. It’s well-written and the language is so perfectly captured I can hear it being said as I read. And like the other plays, something I didn’t mention, because it was originally cast with a couple of well-known actors, I can even imagine it being performed with specific faces and specific voices. This is the earliest, by chronology, of August Wilson’s Century Cycle, taking place in 1904. Like I mentioned in the Faulkner […]

I ain’t no Black Widow nothing!

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I finally got the weird middle aged man at the library to talk with me. He’s mostly kind of chilly, but when I came up with an armload of August Wilson plays, it worked for him. He told me all about how people have been checking out his plays recently, how he read about Denzel Washington’s directorial choices for the new movie, all kinds of stuff. I really like reading the cast lists for these plays from the 1980s. In this one, we had Charles […]

Spoiler: The Piano is a symbol

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

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There’s a moment in Fences where Troy and Bono are telling a story about eating watermelon. In this play, we begin with two characters having secured a truckload of watermelons in order to sell. A student asked me this week what’s the deal with the watermelons. So I asked her “Hey, what’s the deal with the watermelons?” She said, maybe it’s to make the white people in the audience feel really uncomfortable? I said, I didn’t know the answer, but I think she’s onto something. One […]

Fences – A Re-re-re-re-re-review

Fences by August Wilson

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I re-read Fences fairly regularly, every couple years or so, because I have taught it a few times in the past. With the movie coming out, I decided to teach it again this year, and my AP Literature students are currently reading it. What I plan on doing with this short review is to go over some of the considerations I have talked about in class and how we approached some of our conversations about the novel. If you haven’t read or seen Fences, I do recommend […]

Read this before the movie comes out, Part II

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The Chancellor, as a high school English teacher and aficionado of mid-to-late twentieth century American drama, is more well-versed in plays than I am in most time periods. When he heard that August Wilson’s Fences was being turned into a film with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis (also known as The Queen, can we just give her a damn Oscar already???), he freaked out. And then he was startled when I confessed that I had never read or seen it. So he put it into […]



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