Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Like being on a pleasant scenic drive and then plummeting off a cliff to a fiery death

Playground by Richard Powers

by 5 Comments

When people say that the ending of a movie, book, show ruined the whole thing, I rarely agree with them. There are some rare exceptions, looking at you Game of Thrones, but for the most part if I enjoy 90% – 95% of a story then ending being a bit underwhelming does not taint the rest of it for me. It’s about the journey, not the destination is what I say. And I really enjoyed the journey of Playground, but I think the destination is […]

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

The Overstory is the type of novel I dread reviewing. At nearly 500 pages,  nine protagonists, and scores of literary and cultural references, there’s so much to unpack that a review could easily become a doctoral thesis if one had the time and inclination. To properly review, I would almost have to start over and take extensive notes as I read, planting even more stickies on all the pages that contain something interesting or pivotal. Reading this book was both exhausting and exhilarating. The novel is […]

Richard Powers Round Up

The Time of our Singing by Richard Powers

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

Galatea 2.2 – 4/5 This is a reread from when I was in grad school, so something close to 20 years. I’d first heard of this book and Richard Powers from a selection being anthologized in the Norton American lit. It’s a weird book to anthologize because of how cohesive the entirety of the book is and how dependent it is on context. But Richard Powers doesn’t really write short fiction and they must have wanted him in there. The book is not exactly semi-autobiographical, […]

The Gold Bug Variations

The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

My first interaction with this book came from another Richard Powers book, Galatea 2.2, in which the narrator, Richard Powers spends his time lamenting having to give up this book to publication and how much he wants to go back and live with them. That book has some similar focus to this one. In a lot of ways this book is a novel version of Escher, Godel, Bach, which looks at complex systems, number sequences, spirals, patterns, and chaos. This book does the same thing. The […]

Slightly Baffled

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

Warning: here be spoilers America, sometime in the near future. Astrobiologist Theo Byrne raises his son Robin alone after the death of his wife. He feels like he’s doing a terrible job, especially when Robin is sent home from school for smashing his only friend’s face with a thermos. Robin is a complicated child; intelligent but suffering from Aspergers, ADHD, OCD and probably a few other things. Theo is weary to accept the decision; Robin’s school, meanwhile, is pushing him to put the boy on […]

They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

CBR14 BINGO: Minds Square (all about the mind, memories and raising a neuroatypical child) Powers is on the list of writers whose grocery lists I would read. Few can write the kind of prose this man can about the natural world. Always beautiful, unexpected, and poignant, his books are often about how we can’t seem to help ourselves from destroying the world around us. Despite that, he somehow still manages to drape a warm fuzzy blanket around our shoulders at the same time. There is a […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo