Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

fun fact: name dropping Joan Didion no less than 45 times in your 270 page book does not make you Joan Didion

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

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You know that dream where you realize that you have been in assigned to a class for an entire semester, but you have never once attended the class? You “wake up” on the day that your final is due and panic, then cobble together whatever previous assignments that you have scattered about that might be able to pass for whatever you were supposed to do in that class? I am fairly sure that’s what happened to Alice Bolin when she woke up one day, book […]

Didion ain’t no slouch

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of Didion’s essays, previously published in magazines, on a variety of topics with a special interest in California in the 60’s.  The first section, “Lifestyles in the Golden Land”, includes pieces on a murder in San Bernardino, Joan Baez, John Wayne’s last movies, and San Francisco during the summer of love; the next section contains essays on more abstract topics (diary writing, morality, self-esteem); and the third and final section has delves into a broader geography and personal experiences […]

Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers

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This is just our annual reminder…honestly I think I first did this a year ago this week (it’s spring break)…that I don’t like Joan Didion or her writing. This book is…well it’s something. There’s a story here about a senator’s wife being in the limelight in overly unfair and invasive ways. She shows up in the paper several times a week and despite her attempts to remain closed off to the fame and infame, she is thrust otherwise. It’s a perfectly interesting story, and given […]

Odds and Ends

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Presumed Innocent: 4/5 Stars So I didn’t realize this was the same as the Harrison Ford movie until about halfway through the book. I picked it up for two distinct reasons: 1) It was listed as one of the best legal thrillers (old school, we’ll call it) and that reason checks out and 2) the audiobook was read by Edward Hermann, which is obviously great. I have heard him read one book before and it was so good. So the novel itself is told from […]

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”

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In the documentary The September Issue, the generally intimidating and inscrutable Anna Wintour is shown interacting with her high school- or college-aged daughter. The scene is only a few seconds long, but it shows a very human Wintour, just being a mom trying to be cool in front of her daughter.  Sometimes we forget that icons are people. I kept thinking about that scene when reading Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Prior to reading this book, Joan Didion was more of a literary giant or […]



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