Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The City and the Pillar

The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal

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This is Gore Vidal’s third novel, first published in 1948. His first novel Williwaw was a solid success and is one of the very first WWII novels, even though the novel primarily takes place far away from the war. His second novel, In a Yellow Wood, was considerably less successful, perhaps as Vidal intimates in his introduction to this novel, for it not really reflecting what he wanted to write about. He also mentions that his grandfather, a former Senator, was perhaps grooming him to […]

Grabbag

Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal

A Sorrow beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

For Colored Girls... by Ntozake Shange

Madea by Euripides

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Beowulf by Trans. Heaney

Beowulf by Trans. Headley

Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

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Point to Point Navigation – 4/5 This is a second and shorter memoir by Gore Vidal published a few years before he died. It wasn’t right before his death, but you get the impression that he is saying a last few things at least before he begins to wrap up his writing career. His career began when he was about 19 or so when he began writing what would become his first novel, Williwaw, a WWII short novel about a boat in the North Pacific […]

Inventing a Nation

Inventing a Nation by Gore Vidal

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I was 20 on 9/11/01, and in the previous year, my first year of college, I watched the returns of the 2000 presidential election and the extended recounts and the installation of GW Bush as the president by a partisan Supreme Court (phew, thank god we don’t have partisan supreme courts any more!). So in the years following, I was witness to the political disasters of the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq (I will leave Afghanistan aside for the moment), and the years of […]

In which I have to repeatedly recall how to spell labyrinth.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi

A Red Death by Walter Mosley

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan

The Confusions of Young Master Torless by Robert Musil

The Human Comedy by William Saroyan

Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

The Crystal World by JG Ballard

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Labyrinth – 3/5 stars Don’t be fooled by the weird claim on the cover of this book that it’s similar to The Da Vinci Code. It’s not except that this book came out in a time where people were very much trying to capitalize on the success of that novel. The result was some very bad copycats from a novel I love, for how exceedingly silly and dumb it is. I don’t think this novel is among my favorite but it’s so very different from […]

Thanksgiving Short Books

The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nahisi Coates

Buck by MK Asante

Yellow-Back Radio Brokedown by Ishmael Reed

Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara

The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes

The Double Helix by James Watson

Pafko at the Wall by Don Delillo

Williwaw by Gore Vidal

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

The Mahe Circle by Georges Simenon

The Hand by Georges Simenon

The Engagement by Georges Simenon

Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The Promise by Damon Galgut

Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk

Gerald's Party by Robert Coover

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The Beautiful Struggle – 5/5  Stars I never taught in Baltimore City, but I did teach in Baltimore County, where Ta-Nehisi Coates spends part of high school. (I was two schools over, but the idea was pretty much the same there). So the result is some familiarity here. If I ever met Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think what I would want to tell him is when I was brand new to Baltimore, so when I scheduled my meeting with the MVA (DMV) I went to the […]

Lincoln’s Game of Thrones

Lincoln by Gore Vidal

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Much has been made of Abraham Lincoln’s political genius. He is often painted as a savant, manipulating both his opponents and allies to align with his will as he navigated the treacherous years of the American Civil War. Gore Vidal brings this to life in a continuation of his Narratives of Empire series. Although not the second book in publication order, it is the second one in sequence, with one loose connection to the first (no spoilers although Vidal clearly wants to thread the story). Burr, […]



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