Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

History began to exert it fascination upon me when I was about six, through the medium of the Twins series by Lucy Fitch Perkins.

Praticing History by Barbara Tuchman

A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

Deadlock by Sara Paretsky

The Sweet Science by AJ Liebling

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

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Practicing History – 4/5 Stars This is a collection of essays, mostly about history writing, by the American historian Barbara Tuchman. This is my third Tuchman book, and the least “history” one. Her other two books, The First Salute and March to Folly, were both history driven, but also argument driven. This book’s essays cover a wide ranging set of essays, some specifically focused on historical questions like Mao and figures connected to WWI, while the bulk (or at least it feels this way) were mostly about the […]

Early in 1949, in Trinidad, near the end of my schooldays, word came to us in the sixth form of Queen’s Royal College that there was a serious young poet in one of the smaller islands to the north who had just published a marvelous first book of poems.

A Writer's Journey by VS Naipaul

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This is a late collection of essays by the Nobel Prize winning novelist VS Naipaul, who was of Indian descent, from Trinidad, and who wrote in English. The poet in the title of the essay (as Naipaul tells us “the reader may have guessed”) is Derek Walcott, who forms a kind of rival and mentor figure for the young Naipaul as a fledgling writer and thinker. Naipaul was not a poet and tells us he didn’t really like poetry that much either. So having his […]

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

In a Free State by VS Naipaul

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Another early Booker Prize winner. This is interesting and reminds me of some thoughts I had when I found out that a Alice Munro “novel” was also nominated years later. This past year there was a graphic novel nominated as well, and you won’t find me arguing that a graphic novel is not a novel (though I didn’t think that one was particularly good) but you will find people who takes novels “seriously” arguing this point. Like the Munro book, this is an interconnected set […]

After lunch, Jane and Roche left their house on the Ridge to drive to Thrushcross Grange

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This is an intense novel that culminates in some pretty horrific violence that is sort of foreshadowed throughout and hinted at and finally comes to pass. There’s other novels that are similar in some ways — for example, Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown or Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing — but where those novels begin with the violence and then start back to process and understand it, this one hints at it in the beginning and then barrels us forward until it […]

While they waited for the revolution, life had to be lived.

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I didn’t know much about this one going in. The opening was fetching, and I got into it almost immediately. I found it funny, sort of ahead of its time or not quite what I expected, and there were several moments where I was laughing out loud. I got a little “done” with it by the last 100 pages or so (it’s oddly long at 560 pages for an otherwise small feeling story) and so I was happy to finish it when the time came. […]



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