Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Saul Bellow (1)

Dangling Man by Saul Bellow

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“There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions.” This is a reread from a few years ago. This novel takes place in 1941 and is specifically in the form of a diary by a man who is married and somewhat disheveled at the soul-level. What this means here is a feeling of unease and displacement as he goes through his days. The specific nature of this displacement […]

The prince is sleeping now.

Letters from Atlantis by Robert Silverberg

Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

Nightwings by Robert Silverberg

Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson

The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi

Technopoly by Neil Postman

The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman

The Most Beautiful House in the World by Witold Rybczynski

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

The Game of X by Robert Sheckley

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

White Fang by Jack London

The Man on the Balcony by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall

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Letters from Atlantis – 4/5 Stars In this novella, we meet a time travelling archeologist/anthropologist writing letters to his wife. Seems normal enough (well, minus the time travelling) but what we find out is that this narrator is actually 20,000 years in the past in Atlantis, the mythical or not mythical island country that existed pre-historically, and if the stories that go at least as far back as Plato go, was seemingly advanced. So the time traveler is observing, this society has electricity, as well […]

It’s easy enough to see what people think they’re doing.

The Actual by Saul Bellow

Agape Agape by William Gaddis

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So these are two books written by two incredibly famous, talented American (to the extent that Saul Bellow considered himself American) writers nearing the end of their careers, and for Gaddis the end of his life, that are both about 100 or so pages long, were published nearly at the same time and address a lot of the same ideas and issues, focusing on mortality, doubles and doubling, the mechanization of life, the impossibility of representing time in literature, a catalog of language, and various […]

Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Arthur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

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This is a middle career book for Saul Bellow and the book before the book that probably propelled him into the conversation for the Nobel. They’re not exactly awarded for individual books, but certainly those internationally acclaimed books do have a lot of influence. I was sort of avoiding this one because I found it on a list of “The Most Conservative Books of All Time” a list by Conservative commentaters, and I didn’t really feel like dealing with that. It’s not Conservative, and while […]



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