Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fighting the War of Words

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

by Leave a Comment

There’s always a risk in going back to a longer book after failing with it the first time. You may invest too much of your time without the payoff you were hoping for. American Psycho is a rare exception that worked for me. Most of them didn’t. Tree of Smoke didn’t work either. This was my third attempt with it and I powered through it because there was enough interest in the characters to see where it was going but no. I don’t want to say it was […]

Whose history?

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

by Leave a Comment

I picked this book up because it was on a list of “perfect short novels” mentioned in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. There are always so many new books coming out that excite me, so it can be tough to add anything to my TBR pile that isn’t contemporary. I have really been loving books written by poets lately, and really wanting something short to balance out the longer books I’ve been reading. This should have fit right in, but ultimately this wasn’t a book for […]

He was in his fifties. He’d wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who’d wasted only a few years.

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

by Leave a Comment

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s one of those books that when I read it, I was blown away by it, told everyone about it, bought copies of it for gifts, and made everyone talk about it. I haven’t read it in a decade and it’s more and more clearly a younger reader’s book — the very quote I took for the header of this post suggests this. There’s a kind of void and fear of being young and being […]

Florida Woman! (and friends)

Florida by Lauren Groff

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson

by Leave a Comment

I didn’t read the About This Book for either of these until way too late which is how I ended up reading two short story collections back to back at the very beginning of a whirlwind overseas trip. I do apologize because while one was vastly superior to the other, they have both fully blurred together in my mind. I also can’t really remember much about either. Perhaps the reason that Florida stands out above The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is that there was enough […]

Hardboiled On the Go

by 1 Comment

It’s going to be difficult to draw out 250 words on this book. Not because it was bad. I rather enjoyed it. But because it’s really not much more than a fun, slim hardboiled tale. But I’m game to try. Denis Johnson is considered by many to be one of the best writers of the last few decades. I myself have never read him so I can’t comment on that. I’ve been meaning to get to Tree of Smoke for several years now. This one might encourage […]

Drugs and Other Unreliable Narrators

by Leave a Comment

I read this with my mentor for our Advanced Fiction course, and it’s definitely far outside my wheelhouse in both content and structure. Johnson’s story follows an unnamed addict through a series of short snippets told out of order chronicling his cycle of addiction and rehabilitation. Johnson’s choice to tell this story out of order worked very well, as we get to see all the different facets of the narrator regardless of where he is in his habits, or what he’s doing.  All the narration […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo