Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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I wished someone would invent an online calculator – the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict. A calculator is laughable, unthinkable. Yet our moral sense must be made to come into balance with our art-love. I wanted there to be a universal balance, a universal answer. ― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma CBR16Bingo: Bananas We are living in an age where […]

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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CBR15 BINGO: Sex, because people are having casual sex in this book, except for Jake because. . .ya know. It has been banned and challenged because of its focus on sex (in addition to general debauchery). BINGO: South America, Politics, Take Flight, In the Wild, Sex “You’re an expatriate, you’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an […]

The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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The second in my Literature with a Capital L series, The Sun Also Rises is another Hemingway, this time featuring am early-thirties group of friends trundling around Europe having adventures consisting primarily of fishing, sex, and bull-fighting. I’m not going to rehash everything I said in my previous post, but my problem with Hemingway boils down to the fact that the Wikipedia plot summary for this book, aka what should be the most succinct summary you can find, begins with “on the surface,” suggesting that […]

You won’t have to write a book report on these

Who Is R. L. Stine by M.D. Payne

Who Was Maurice Sendak by Janet B. Pascal

Who Was Ernest Hemingway by Jim Gigliotti

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I know some are familiar with the Who Are/Who Was series? And, I have written abut them before, so saying they are books about a subject (person for the Who Are/Was, place or thing for the What Is/What Was), and they have realistic, black and white illustrations that are not necessarily “fantastic” but get the point across and there is a double timeline at the end (for the subject, in this case  three authors, and the world timeline) is redundant. But needed as an intro […]

Ernest Hemingway

By Line Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway

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“Hemingway’s literary apprenticeship was served in journalism, and his later work in the field earned him money and sent him to places where he wished to be. Yet his enthusiasm, his compassion, and his imagination made such writing far more than just timely stuff. Some readers will no doubt view the material as rounding out the Hemingway record; others, it is to be hoped, will regard it simply as among the best newspaper and magazine reporting available in our troubled times. —William White, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway […]

Literature with a Capital L

The Old Man & The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

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I’m not a fan of Literary Fiction. Ultimately, I think it’s a good thing. It’s the concept car of fiction, pushing the envelope and helping to define how the field operates. It’s what my favorite creative writing teacher (though possibly my least favorite, I have two separate people in my head to which I want to attribute this quote) called, Literature with a Capital L. It’s also my least favorite thing to read, because of what I, as an uncultured barely hominid raccoon-person uncharitably call, […]



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