Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Less really is more

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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What a fun ride! After my last award winning read turned  out to be a letdown (The Space Between), I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Greer’s novel.  Less focuses on Arthur Less, a mediocre writer having professional and personal difficulties- his publisher and his long-time boyfriend have both dumped him.  As the boyfriend’s wedding to someone else approaches, Arthur panics- he doesn’t want to attend the wedding but he doesn’t want to refuse the invite as it would be admitting that he […]

Belated Bingo – Travel. Less is indeed more.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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Back in the day, I had a dream that I would excel at CBR Bingo. I did get one bingo, but alas, that was all I could muster in the timeframe. Even though I didn’t blow the doors off the competition, I thoroughly enjoyed planning and plotting my bingo card and thus I’ve decided to read a few more on the ol’ bingo card, even though it only “counts” to me, as it were. I believe I was going to use Less for Rainbow Flag […]

Less is more…. I’m so sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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I saw that Less won the Pulitzer Prize and was available at my library so I checked it out.  The award is the ONLY thing I knew about the book when I began reading it. Less is about Andrew Less, a writer about to turn fifty and going through some sort of mid-life crisis.  His younger, on again/off again boyfriend is getting married and his book is rejected by his publisher.  He uses the opportunity to accept offers that he has to travel the world […]

He kisses . . . like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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The Pulitzer Prize for fiction tends to be more miss than hit for me, especially in the last several years, so when I heard the announcement last spring about Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t know the author by name, hadn’t heard anything about the book, and figured I could safely skip this one. But then I read a brief synopsis: gay novelist in his 40’s, heartbroken and struggling with his work, runs away and something-something-I-don’t-remember because I stopped reading […]

Less is More

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This book won the Pulitzer Prize. I didn’t know that until I sat down to write this review, so I have no idea how it wound up on my radar. I’m very glad it did. Arthur Less is a novelist. He has an enemy and a nemesis, which is a lot of antagonists for someone who isn’t particularly antagonistic; an identity-defining blue suit; friends; and ex-boyfriends, the most recent of whom is marrying another man. And he is about to turn 50. Arthur can’t bring […]

He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

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Less – 3/5 Stars This is the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize this year, and I do like it. But it’s almost like Andrew Sean Greer tricked or taunted the Pulitizer Committee into giving him the prize since this is a novel about a slightly failed or at least merely moderately successful writer putzing around while others around him remind him of his own mediocrity or middlingness but doing things like winning the Pulitzer Prize. The novel begins with Less, the eponymous protagonist, being […]



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