Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Loss of Innocence

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

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Our Town by Thornton Wilder My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Our Town” is one of those plays that takes you by surprise. I first read it in my master’s program in an “Modern American Drama” class. I had heard of the play but never read it. From the beginning, Wilder establishes that this play is unlike others of its time. The Stagemaster (narrator) constantly breaks the fourth wall but also interacts with the characters in the play. There’s audience participation (they’re plants from the […]

Theophilus North and The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Theophilus North by Thornton Wilder

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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Theophilus North – 4/5 Stars This last novel of Wilder’ was written in the 1970s, when he was also in his 70s and would die a few years after. The vantage point of the novel is from about the 1970s, but involves a young man who went to Yale (Wilder went to Yale when he was a young) who gets a leave of absence from his job as a Latin and French tutor at a private boys school and moves to Newport, Rhode Island to […]

Longs and Shorts

The Big Book of Reel Murders by Ed. Otto Penzler

My Head! My Head! by Robert Graves

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Heart by Jade Anouka

Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch

The Ophelia Network by Mur Lafferty

Deep Hole by Don Winslow

Legal Immigrant by Alan Cumming

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

The Cube by Adam Rapp

Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Pale Sister by Colm Toibin

Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The Big Book of Reel Murders – Edited by Otto Penzler – 4/5 The concept of this collection is still mostly pulpy stories (though with some other older stories and more contemporary stories not really pulpy) that were made into films. It should really be called “Reel Crimes” as not every story involves a murder, but the concept mostly works. It ends up being a little frayed throughout as apparently it’s just much easier to get some rights to stories than others, so like the […]

I’m never crossing a rope bridge again

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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A group of people are crossing the Bridge of San Luis Rey, an Incan rope bridge in Peru, when it collapses and all, tragically, plummet to their deaths. Observing this tragedy is Brother Juniper, a friar, who decides to tell the stories of those who died in this accident in order to conclusively prove that God has a divine plan. What follows in a series of vignettes into the interconnected lives of these few in early 18th century. Originally published in 1927, this novel won […]

Evolution of a Screwball Comedy

The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder

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I am continuing my dive through the plays that once belonged to my parents, former theatre nerds and aspiring stage actors, and the most interesting part is discovering that a lot of these plays (even ones I’ve never heard of) have been Broadway hits or even Hollywood Oscar winners (see: Butterflies are Free). The Matchmaker has a long and winding history in theatre and film- in 1938 it was published as a re-write of several earlier (1835, 1842, 1938) comedies, under the title “The Merchant […]

The bridge is love

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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Cbr12bingo Roaring Twenties I know I read this book in high school, but I didn’t remember much about it before re-reading it this week. I think it’s the kind of novel that means more to you the more you’ve lived and seen of the world, and reading it in our very troubled times was a kind of balm for the soul. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, published in 1927 and winner of the 1928 Pulitzer, is the fictional story of five people whose lives […]



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