Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Happy Birthday, Toni Morrison!

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison was born February 18, 1931. She is the GOAT of American Literature. Tar Baby is Toni Morrison’s fourth novel, published in 1981. Set on a private Caribbean island, New York City and a small Florida town, it is a novel that grapples head on with race, sex, class, and the relationship black Americans have with both the past and future.  The novel begins shortly before Christmas on L’Arbe de la Croix, a private island owned by an American candy magnate named Valerian Street. […]

I can share the seethe of millions, but it won’t do. Rage has limited uses and serious flaws.

The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

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This is a collection of essays from Toni Morrison. That more or less should speak for itself in terms of what you’re getting if you decide to read this one. It’s not a total collected works but more so works along some broad themes to present her nonfiction thinking from the last 30 years or so. So a few things happen when you read this book or a few considerations to make in reading this one: one, her political, racial, and cultural writing outside of […]

You know your love keeps on lifting me, lifting me higher and higher

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CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 (BINGO!) When I named Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as one of my three desert island books earlier this year, I realized two things: (1) I’ve only read it once, and that was about 15 years ago, and (2) I haven’t even owned a copy for half that time, having lost track of my original through several big moves (I blame my ex). I bought a fresh copy this spring, and when CBR10Bingo rolled around, I had this book in mind for […]

The pursuit of happiness

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In the introduction to Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison writes about the death of her father and the inspiration for the novel. She found herself talking to him and wondering what the men he had known were really like. For the first time, with Song of Solomon, Morrison writes from her male characters’ perspective, and these male characters are focused on flight, on some journey of their own, a pursuit after something that might bring them happiness. Macon Dead is a prosperous businessman in the […]

My last Toni Morrison, and it was a good one.

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I’m a huge fan of Toni Morrison, which is no secret around these parts. I’ve read all but Song of Solomon, but I had found it a paperback copy at Goodwill. I never know how a Morrison novel will turn out, but this one is absolutely in the top half of her oeuvre. Hooray! I’m glad I invested in the purchased copy, for sure. I am looking forward to unpacking the novel and revisiting it (maybe teaching it) in the years to come. It’s always […]

An American Horror Story

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Our envy of others devours us most of all. ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn At one point in Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, a character reflects on jealousy and envy. As a child, she was familiar with jealousy — that feeling that someone else has gotten something that rightfully belongs to you. Envy, when it comes, is a new and unsettling feeling, a perception that somehow, one is lacking something. In The Bluest Eye, that something is beauty, beauty as defined by others, beauty […]



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