Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Thoughts of Home

The Flavors of Iraq: Impressions of My Vanished Homeland by Feurat Alani and Léonard Cohen

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The old “I was looking at my saved online reader links” comes into play with how I found The Flavors of Iraq: Impressions of My Vanished Homeland by Feurat Alani and Léonard Cohen.  I saw that it was the only one in that email (how I save the links) and figured it was a sign to read it. From May 2024, the history I grew up with comes back into play. However, instead of seeing it from an American or Western point of view, we […]

Assorted Nonfiction I

The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen

A Load of Hooey by Bob Odenkirk

You Do You by Various

Here is New York by EB White

Bad Faith by Mike Daisy

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The Painted Word – Tom Wolfe – 4/5 Stars I haven’t read a lot of Tom Wolfe (white suit, not Southern writer) but he was one of those public figures who was just around in my childhood watching tv. He made a guest spot on the Simpsons for example. This essay takes a look at contemporary art about up to 1975 ending more or less with pop art and photorealism. The essay begins with a paraphrased idea that art used to work: the art drives […]

I’m longing for a better attention span

Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

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I don’t know about you, but since lockdown started I’ve really struggled to read anything. My scattered brain keeps wandering off to poke and worry at other things, and suddenly books I’d normally tear through are being read over months instead. I’m really missing my escapes into books and so, in an attempt to get my reading mojo back, I turned to the poetry of one of my favourites. I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen for a very long time so it was no […]

A Song, Its Creator, the Artists Who Interpret It, and More Than 30 Years of Impact

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In much the same way that my brother’s visit inspired me to pick up Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for Peoplein a Hurry the Winter Olympics pushed me to move The Holy or the Broken up my to read pile. There were several figure skaters who performed to some version of “Hallelujah” and I’ve always had an interest in this iconoclast of a song, so the book was already on its way to me by happenstance (it was however delayed by over 20 days in arriving […]

“What’s life for?”

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Shortly after Leonard Cohen died, I was wandering through a Half-Price Books when I stumbled upon a couple of his books of poetry. I picked up 2006’s Book of Longing as tribute to the artist. Fortuitously, NPR’s Terry Gross recently re-released a 2006 interview with Cohen about this very book. I listened to the interview concurrently with my own reading and wrestling with the text. The context for the book that the interview provided was helpful: Cohen wrote a large chunk of Longing while living at a Zen […]



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