Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In this particular hive she was undoubtedly queen bee.

The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy

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Sometimes I talk about Led Zeppelin and The Velvet Underground in the way of how a single of their song might account for the entire catalog of a later band. How someone might have heard the song “No Quarter” and 25 years later we have Tool. It’s not exactly true, but it makes a kind of sense to me. Here we have a novel that feels like it launched a 1000 contemporary careers from Richard Yates to Rachel Kushner to Jennifer Egan to John Updike […]

They had opposed the marriage to my mother, I understood.

Winter Count by Barry Lopez

Cast a Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen

A Blue Tale and Other Stories by Marguerite Yourcenar

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Winter Count – 4/5 Stars This is a small collection of mostly atmospheric and impressionistic short fiction, more sketches than stories, by the travel and nature writer Barry Lopez. He is most famous for his longer nonfiction like Of Wolves and Men, Arctic Dreams, and you might be hearing his name more prominently in the next few months based on early reviews of his latest book, Horizon. This book is a series of small fictions that mostly deal with little moments, painted scenes, character sketches, […]

Robert, have done with nursery pap, Write like a man.

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Country Sentiment – 2/5 Stars Here’s the poem that ends this collection: A FIRST REVIEW. Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys Are here discreetly blent; Admire, you ladies, read, you boys, My Country Sentiment. But Kate says, “Cut that anger and fear, True love’s the stuff we need! With laughing children and the running deer That makes a book indeed.” Then Tom, a hard and bloody chap, Though much beloved by me, “Robert, have done with nursery pap, Write like a man,” says he. […]

A wry self-awareness missing from so many takedowns of generations of youth.

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The Group  Here’s a line from the Wikipedia about this book: “Notably, Norman Mailer for The New York Review of Books wrote that, “her book fails as a novel by being good but not nearly good enough…she is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel.” [6]“ While many of you likely know Norman Mailer as the grump who won’t stop drinking iced tea at the Dragon Fly Inn in Stars Hollow, you might not know he was once a notable piece of shit. That’s […]



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