Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The LONG Long Goodbye

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

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I picked this up thanks in large part to Megan Abbott’s review. It’s not her fault, though, that I didn’t like it. For Goodreads, Abbott talked about the book’s similarities to Robert Altman’s movie The Long Goodbye, mostly in terms of aesthetics, a forgotten Los Angeles, as well as the narrator’s anxiety. The Long Goodbye is one of my all time favorite movies, Chandler but better. So I had to grab this. And yeah, she is right that it gets the aesthetics well. I deeply felt […]

I remember this being one of my first moments nearing adulthood, when I realized how powerful memory was — or at least it was the first time it hurt the most. And there was nothing I could do about the pain of the past — it just settled over me

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

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CBR Bingo – Queer Lives “Y’all. Bret Easton Ellis is NOT OKAY.” So says I, at my book club where we read this book. I read American Psycho about a decade ago and distinctly remember getting to something so disturbing that I yelped out loud, slammed the book shut, and tossed it across the room. If that visceral experience sounds exciting to you, well Ellis has plenty more to disturb and haunt you with, and in this, his newest book, he will take 595 pages […]

Some bad men

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

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Journey to the End of the Night – 4/5 Stars This one is a bitter pill. Not for me, but for the writer and character. I don’t know how much of this is a roman a clef, a veiled memoir, or a persona allowing the writer to hide within the text. But the novel itself is drenched in sarcasm, irony, cynicism, and disgust. We begin with our narrator finding his way into the army right near the beginning of WWI. This of course is not […]

Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You …

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

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If you haven’t read American Psycho yet, you’re in for a real treat.  Either that or you will hate me for recommending this book and possibly sue me for damages and mental distress. In any case, Patrick Bateman, the titular American Psycho, has become part of pop culture.  Whether you’ve read the book, seen the (excellently adapted) movie, or just know him from this gif: You know that he’s a narcissistic Wall Street trust fund baby with a serious case of bloodlust and unmitigated misogyny. But […]

Cannonballing with a book that was formative and remains shockingly relevant

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It feels deeply appropriate to Cannonball with a book that I read for the first time four years ago, a book that set off my dissertation in motion and is now in process of becoming my (hopefully) next published article. Cheers! I first read this book in Spring of 2013 and was horrified/piqued by the content. I was so piqued that I wrote my first dissertation chapter on it. I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to get an article published, and the […]

Bret Easton Ellis goes bananas. Hijinks ensue.

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I read American Psycho for CBR5, and it was—at the time—a profoundly shocking and defining experience. If you’ve followed me for the past few years on CBR or Goodreads, then you’ll recall that I ended up featuring the novel in my fourth chapter of my dissertation and have since continued talking about it to this day. So apparently, the trauma couldn’t have ruined me forever, right? I wondered what other Ellis novels would be like, but I read Less Than Zero and HATED IT. So, […]



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