Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Now that I’m older I know that life is not about what keeps you safe, but what you keep safe, and that’s what matters most.

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim

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CBR14 BINGO: Heart Square (And so begins one of my favorite times of the year: CBR Bingo! This is a literal “heart” square filler as every character with a heart has it broken.) I wanted to like this one more than I did. It is a beautifully written novel about love that somehow lacks warmth. In a weird way, it reminded me of the Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels. I loved those books but was always haunted by the coldness of them. This book has a casual cruelness to […]

Revisiting a Classic and (Surpise!) Enjoying It

Dune by Frank Herbert

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I re-read Dune by Frank Herbert this year because a member of my work book club selected it. The rules of work book club are: we pick a book that has a movie or television adaptation, so that we can still hang out and gossip with the folks in the book club who inevitably don’t read the book. Those of us who do always read the book get to discuss what we liked or didn’t like about the adaptation. We rotate between who chooses the […]

Poetry Stuff

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch

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CBR14Bingo – Verse The Hatred of Poetry This book is just fantastic. I’ve never not thoroughly enjoyed any of Ben Lerner’s books (and maybe one day I will read some of his poetry). He takes the topic of why people hate poetry and thinks through the wheres and whys of it — that it’s old, that it’s hard to read, that it’s oblique, and that it’s annoying. But he’s a poet and well, irony and all that. “Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond […]

The Runaway Jury

The Runaway Jury by John Grisham

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CBR Bingo 14 – Holiday This book was on the shelf on my AirBnb this past week when I really needed something, not very taxing, to read and my books were failing me. I read this on vacation so if I liked it more than I might otherwise, blame that. I picked this up, had no clue what it was going to be about, and loved every stupid second of it. The novel begins with a just expert consulting group group spying on a man […]

Grab Bag

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascensia

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

Mountain by Cixin Liu

The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakmi

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson

Homecoming by Eddie Huang

The Matchlock Rifle by Walter Edmonds

Two Logs Crossing by Walter Edmonds

Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

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Mortality – 4/5 Stars This is a partial memoir and final notes first published by Vanity Fair and then in book form from the final days of Christopher Hitchens. There’s a part in the middle of every thing where someone tells Hitchens something like “God works in mysterious ways” and Hitchens wonders what is so mysterious about a heavy smoker getting advanced lung cancer. That’s the basic idea here. First things first, it’s not secret that Hitchens is a bit of a bugbear, and for […]

The Healing

The Healing by Gayl Jones

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CBR14Bingo – Star The star here is in reference to our narrator’s work as a manager for a contemporary rock and roll singer, the ways in which this relationship shapes the narrative, and the discussion is elicits.   Gayl Jones tips her hand late in this book when one character calls our narrative a “picara”/. In doing so, we learn what we need to know about our narrator and what to do with the Quixotic and episodic novel. If you’ve read Gayl Jones’s first two […]



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