Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Oof

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

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[Check content warnings: there are a lot of them.] After Banned Books Week, a friend decided that as a way of encouraging people to read banned books year round, she’d create a banned books book club, and The Bluest Eye was the first selection. This is only my third Morrison book (loved Beloved, was not a fan of God Help the Child), and I’m glad I read it, but it is not an easy read. It is intense, distressing, and bleak. There is almost no hope to be found this book. […]

Beautiful and Hard to Grasp

Jazz by Toni Morrison

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Bingo: Free (taking the place of “Arts” square) I read quite a bit of Toni Morrison many years ago, and remember being dazzled. More than most writers, she could really draw deep feelings out of me. A while back I read a passage from her book Jazz, and it was so evocative it made me buy the book. Like her other works, it’s incredibly beautiful and real and heart-breaking. But it was also a hard book to read because I truly got lost sometimes and […]

Toni Morrison (1)

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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I was just reading Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar, and she discusses Beloved briefly as a Madea story. This is true in the sense that the plot of Beloved involves Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman now ten or more years after the Civil War, living in a house in Ohio that is haunted by some sort of presence. Sethe too is a quite haunted woman. In a moment of abject fear and panic, some years earlier Sethe kills her infant daughter when she believes that she’s […]

Her only short story

Recitatif by Toni Morrison

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Recitatif is Toni Morrison’s only short story. Published in 1983, the version I read was republished in 2022 and featured an introduction by Zadie Smith (the introduction was longer than the short story). I often regret reading introductions before I read the main story because I usually prefer to have my own thoughts and impressions when reading something new. On the other hand, I probably notice and take more in when I’ve been primed by an introduction. Anyway, Zadie Smith’s introduction was very smart and thoughtful. […]

Mirrors

Recitatif by Toni Morrison

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Technically, Recitatif is a short story – generously, it could be called a novella – but was released recently (I think) as a full book with an introduction by Zadie Smith, and so I’ll count it as a novel unto itself here. For the unfamiliar, this is a story where race is central to the plot – but never clarified. The story follows two girls, Twyla and Roberta, who were brought to room 406 at a sort of boarding school for children whose parents are unable […]

In which I finally rectify having never read an American master of writing

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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[TW: violence against children, racial slurs, depictions of slavery, abuse] BINGO – UnCannon In high school I took two AP English classes. In college, I took a Comparative Western Literature course. Toni Morrison was not on any of my reading lists for those courses despite the fact that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and that Beloved was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Perhaps, Morrison is not read more at […]



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