Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I, a person who does not read memoirs, enjoyed this memoir

Just Kids by Patti Smith

by 1 Comment

I had hardly ever listened to Patti Smith’s music before picking up this book, and I hardly ever read memoirs, because I find most of them self-indulgent and boring, sorry, memoirists! But this one was recommended to me as a memoir that was “worth it” and it was available from the library. Good news: it was totally worth it! Even if you, like me, are only passingly aware of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorp’s body of work! Smith’s prose is plainspoken and authentic, which makes […]

Portrait of the Artists

Just Kids by Patti Smith

by Leave a Comment

Let’s start with an embarrassing confession: Yes, I only read this book because Taylor Swift mentioned Patti Smith in the title track of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. Essentially, the Swiftian shoutout made me realize that Patti Smith has been a cultural blindspot for me. I never had the phase where I got really into ’70s punk and bought a CBGB’s t-shirt. I wasn’t cool enough. Just Kids is not primarily focused on Smith’s rock-and-roll career, though. It is mainly about her early […]

New York City in the 70s man. You just had to be there

Just Kids by Patti Smith

by Leave a Comment

Last year I read Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, which takes place in the arts scene in New York in the early ‘70s. Just Kids feels like the novel that Kushner was trying to write, or at least the world she was trying to fit her characters into. The contrast between these two works was really highlighted by how vibrant and desire-filled Smith’s book is- the things that bothered me about The Flamethrowers were the limp, motive-less main character and the pretension of the art world […]

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”

Just Kids by Patti Smith

by Leave a Comment

CBR Bingo: Music (and my second Bingo!) Just Kids (2010) by Patti Smith is another book I found and decided to read because of Cannonball Bingo. I’m sure I could have found a number of books that worked for the Music square, but I wanted to read something that made it worth it. I saw that Just Kids had won the National Book Award and I was intrigued. I don’t think I’m the target reader for this book. My knowledge of musicians and artists is limited at best, […]

a fine final read of 2019

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

by 4 Comments

I first came across Little Women as a child, and I came across it out of order; we had an old cloth-bound copy of Jo’s Boys on the bookshelf in my childhood home. It was next to Treasure Island, which I had devoured, and being a child I assumed that since books were next to each other they must be related. Ooops! I quickly learned the error of my ways (thanks Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library!) and settled down with an old illustrated tome. I was Jo. Who wasn’t […]

I looked down at my feet, avoiding the sign’s scrutinizing energy.

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

by Leave a Comment

This is a short memoir or more so collection of memoir essays by Patti Smith that trace the last few years. They seem to deal primarily with aging, reading, artists, work, working, and the deaths or dying of several of her friends and colleagues. There’s a running thread through this book about performance and creation — not so much the creative process — but the actual process of creation. There’s an early reference to Antonin Artaud, and it occurred to me while reading this, that […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo