Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sing Me Sweet Nothings! Or, Don’t.

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

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    My mom’s family is solid Norwegian – I am only second generation American on that side.  So much of this book struck home with me.  Those people can work, and so nonchalantly, too.  Many don’t realize that until fairly recently, Norway was a very poor country, with steep rocky soil and a very short growing season.  Most of the men were out on the sea for most of the year as fishermen or merchant seaman, while the women stayed home to tend their […]

Just wait until I get my foot on the ladder.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

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This is one of those novels that’s been in my collective TBR list of my mind for more than a decade and if you want a young writer to feel like abjectness and poverty and being a wastrel are a priori to being successful, I have to imagine that this is going to be one of the earliest good examples to give them a copy of. It’s almost like a Letters to a Young Male Writer in that it’s a journalist trying to make it […]

“… it will never do for you to go and starve yourself to death.”

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

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In the late 19th century, a struggling writer wanders the streets of the city of Christiania, hungry and destitute, while clinging to dreams of greatness. I have seen many comparisons of Hunger to Crime and Punishment and I can see the similarities but where Dostoevsky’s book moved me immensely when I read it for the first time, Hunger left me as cold as a stone, and where I could feel Raskolnikov’s agony as if it were a living entity, I was mostly annoyed at Hamsun’s […]



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