Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

We Know the Night

Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins

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When I hit my formative years, I believe Rollins was mostly in his spoken word phase. I didn’t know anything about Rollins Band or Black Flag yet – I just saw this shirtless old man on mtv, shredded and screaming and intelligent. Most of my brainy musical icons were not aggressive body builders. I can’t imagine Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Buckley stabbing anyone with broken glass. Rollins intrigued. A few years ago, I started reading and listening to longer-form interviews with guys like Rollins, Patton Oswalt, […]

“‘And then Adam was like, “Who’s Jesus?” and God said, “No one yet. It’s just an idea I’m throwing around.”‘

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I admire Jenny Lawson so much, even more now that I’ve read this book. She’s frequently very open on her blog about her mental illness, but she’s never been this open before. It must have taken a great deal of courage to talk so freely about such personal things. Then again, maybe it didn’t. Jenny herself admits in the book there’s a kind of freedom that you can only achieve once you stop caring what other people think and truly accept yourself, flaws and all. […]

“Benedict Cumberbatch is like Alan Rickman Benjamin Buttoning”

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Back in October 2012, when I finally decided to see what all these Cannonballers were on about when they kept gushing about a strange-looking book with a taxidermied mouse on the cover, and gave in and read Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, I didn’t actually know who the Bloggess was. What a sad and empty place my life was up until that point. Once I actually read her first book, I also went out and bought it in audio book (She sings the chapter titles […]

The grit and flavor of a Lehane novel, set in Brooklyn

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This book by a young Dennis Lehane protégé socked me in the gut. It is about a small tragedy in a depressed and ramshackle corner of Brooklyn, which has reverberations that reach deep into the ethnically mixed population of Red Hook and teaches them—and us, the reader– about loss, grief, redemption and hope.   It is a sultry summer night, the bars and street corners are hopping, and teen friends Valerie and June are bored and antsy. They decide to go for a midnight float […]

A story of family dysfunction and the impact of loss

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A painful story of a dysfunctional family plagued by mental illness, Housekeeping is nonetheless beautifully written and highly evocative. Two young sisters Ruth and Lucille are left alone when their unmoored mother dumps them at their grandmother’s house at a tender age, and then proceeds to drive herself off a cliff and into a lake, the same lake that her own father—a dreamy, frustrated, and regret-filled man–had died in following a train wreck years earlier. Their aged Nona is a loving and gentle caregiver, but […]

Man is a Monster

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Literary classics earn their designation by presenting themes that resonate throughout the ages. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is just such a literary classic. She wrote this short but brilliant tale when she was about 20, while she, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron were on holiday in Switzerland. As the poor weather prevented their outdoor adventures, the three entertained themselves with stories of the “supernatural.” Shelley’s Frankenstein has become a world renowned classic and a staple of Halloween partiers everywhere. And yet, Shelley’s scary […]



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