Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

They crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge…

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

by 1 Comment

This book asks the question: what if we took Lena Grove plot from William Faulkner’s Light in August and made it more grim, grisly, and depressing? This book begins with a girl of 16 giving birth to a child in the Tennessee backwoods. It’s her brother’s child, and after the birth he takes it out to the woods and abandons it. He tells her it died and he buried it, but when she presses him, he tells her he left it. It becomes clear that […]

A Grim Look at the End

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

by Leave a Comment

Maybe because I caught a nasty summer cold and already feel dreadful but this book just left me sad and in tears. I don’t know what else to say except McCarthy wrote a heart breaking book about the end of the world as we know it following a boy and his father. The book moves pretty quickly and sometimes you may get confused about who is talking (there are no quotes) but the book in the end shows you the worst of humanity and sometimes […]

“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

by Leave a Comment

This book sat on my shelf for a decade because I was too scared to read it. It’s great, everyone said. It’s great, but it’s heavy. It is both of those things. It’s also, unexpectedly, the best book on fatherhood I’ve ever read. More on that later. Plotwise, The Road is not paving (haha) any new terrain: An apocalyptic event occurred within the last decade, and the survivors are trying to eke out an existence. The main threat isn’t the scarred earth – it’s the other […]

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

by Leave a Comment

CBR10Bingo – AND SO IT BEGINS and THIS IS THE END So this series of books came out in the 1990s and sort of represents a significant shift in Cormac McCarthy’s writing or more so signals the closing of the second phase of his writing and he moved toward the final section (depending on how much more he publishes — he’s pretty old). The first phase is more or less represented through his Tennessee novels. These novels are (simplistically) defined by working within the Southern […]

The Road redux

by 1 Comment

I read this novel when it first came out in 2006 or so. I was teaching for my first year in Baltimore and I read this novel is my bare-ass room in a basement apartment in Baltimore. I had recently read and reviewed No Country for Old Men, and so the spare details of the novel and it’s subject was a lot to take. This time around I listened to the audiobook while I cleaned out my gross ass basement. Like super gross. Bugs. Spidewebs. Muck. […]

“They bred dogs for everything else…why didnt they breed them to live longer?”

by 12 Comments

Yet another post-apocalyptic novel set in the not too distant future. I know. It’s like every fifth book written these days is set during the end of humanity. I suppose that says something about the fatalism of America in a post 9/11, post-truth world. But this isn’t the Walking Dead. There isn’t a zombie in sight, in fact. The Dog Stars is more The Thin Red Line meets The Road. It’s a somber reflection of the end of the world, at times haunting and told in a lyrical […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo