Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Filling in My Gaps

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

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I made it a point earlier this year to try to be better. One of the things I told myself that I would do is read more books by black authors, especially those that I should have already read. I was assigned Should of Black Folk in college. I probably still have my copy on a bookshelf in my house but I doubt that I read it for class. Maybe enough to get by in case I was called on but I didn’t really read […]

That Invisible Frontier

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin

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Leo Proudhammer, a 39-year-old, black, successful actor, suffers a heart attack on stage. This prompts him to look back on the events and people that shaped him, from growing up poor in Harlem to trying to make it big in the theatre as a young man, and from his turbulent relationship with his older brother Caleb and his long lasting liaison with the white actress Barbara to his affair with the young revolutionary Christopher. The way James Baldwin dissects race relations in America may be […]

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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If we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world It is time to listen. James Baldwin had a voice unlike any other. He transcends country, creed, and time. His work is astonishing and terribly important. The […]

Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

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A great collection of short stories by James Baldwin. Generally (if not all of) these stories are near perfect, and a good reminder of how much I really like listening to short story collections on audiobook. The opening story “The Rockpile” is one of those perfect stories (I think “Sonny’s Blues” and “Going to Meet the Man” are the obvious others), begins us with a boy watching his step-brother defy all order to stay in the house and goes to the neighborhood rockpile where there’s […]

The dam’d blood burst, first through his nostrils, then pounded through the veins in his neck…

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

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It’s interesting to me because no matter how incisive, and even painful, and even stark and sharp James Baldwin’s nonfiction is, nonfiction in which I find myself partly the subject as a white man in the US, I tend to find it so clear and so precise that it’s almost light to read. (Stylistically and execution, not subject and tone). But his fiction feels almost miasmic a lot of the time and he grapples to represent the phenomenon of existence in prose. This is not […]

Son of a Preacher Man

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

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CBR11Bingo: Banned Books Sometimes the timing isn’t right. Working my way painstakingly through James Baldwin’s breakthrough novel, I could tell that it was beautifully written, with dazzling prose. I could tell that the story was intensely personal for Baldwin. I have no quarrel with its sterling reputation and its place high up in the rankings of American fiction. But if I’m being honest, I just could not will myself to the end of this novel. After a moving opening section that largely takes place on […]



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