Cannonball Read 10

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter

I'm trying to slow down. I stress read, but I would like to enjoy things more.

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vel veeter's Reviews:

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

The Left-Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin

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CBR10Bingo – Birthday! (Ursula LeGuin October 21) To paraphrase Octavia Butler is talking about her novel “Survivor,” her book she kind of abandoned to out of print status: it was her Star Trek novel. This means that ultimately what she felt was happening in that novel was too conceit-heavy, too tropey, and too much about discovery of a weird alien race and then turning into a kind of hackneyed sci fi Golden Age schlock. In the two first Hain novels, there’s a kind of teetering on the edge of being “Star Trek” novels, where it’s just a different planet with […]

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10/15/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:371 |

The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternative.

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

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CBR10Bingo – Home Something Home So I grew up in and currently live in Virginia. And I am from the western part of the state, which is more conservative than I like to admit these days, but also was significantly poorer and mountainous than the huge farming belts in the middle and eastern parts of the state. And so begins the lie that many white people like to tell themselves reflecting on their place in the South in a post-Civil War society. The people of my hometown as a whole were no more “innocent” of slavery and its crimes than […]

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10/15/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:370 |

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

Changing My Mind; Their Eyes were Watching God; Netherland; Remainder by Zadie Smith; Zora Neale Hurston; Joseph O'Neill; Tom McCarthy

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Changing My Mind – 4/5 Stars So this post is a compendium of reviews based initially on my reading of this, Zadie Smith’s early collection of essays. These essays are not part of an intentional collection and represent a set number of years of nonfiction writing projects for Smith. The best of them are the reviews, including and sometimes especially her movie reviews, longform journalism (which is the least interesting, if not impactful writing in the book), writing about writing, and writing about her father. Her reviews often pair books or films together, as a lot of say London Review […]

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Purchase Changing My Mind; Their Eyes were Watching God; Netherland; Remainder by Zadie Smith; Zora Neale Hurston; Joseph O'Neill; Tom McCarthy or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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10/15/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:369 |

I am forty-six years old and that is my insight, that life is made up of events that have to be parried.

Spring; Summer by Karl Ove Knausgard

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Spring – 5/5 Stars Summer – 4/5 Stars The first two volumes of Karl Ove Knausgard’s Årstidsencyklopedien Cycle (which translates to something like Seasonal Encyclopedia) function more or less as the title suggests. A few years ago, after completing what is likely his masterwork My Struggle, a six-volume series of novels based on an interpretative view of his life (and I have to say having read the first three, that while they do focus on a lot of minutia, they are much more structures, focused, and broadly appealing that any description can represent), Karl Ove Knausgard turned his writer’s pen to […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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10/15/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:365 |

I might have been ten, eleven years old–I cannot say for certain–when my first master died. No one grieved him

Washington Black; Transcription; The Infinite Blacktop; Almanac for the Dead; Whose Body?; Hope in the Darkness by Esi Edugyan; Kate Atkinson; Sara Gran; Leslie Marmon Silko; Dorothy M Sayers; Rebecca Solnit

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Washington Black – 4/5 Stars This novel just recently was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and by all rights, it should win. It also is possibly the front runner given that a Canadian author has not won in some time…possibly since Margaret Atwood for The Blind Assassin, but I’d have to check. It’s also quite simply the best book on the list that I’ve read and while I was worried it was going to be a little whimsical or odd, it’s actually nearly perfect. It’s Haiti in the 1830s on a sugar plantation owned by a British businessman. He also […]

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Purchase Washington Black; Transcription; The Infinite Blacktop; Almanac for the Dead; Whose Body?; Hope in the Darkness by Esi Edugyan; Kate Atkinson; Sara Gran; Leslie Marmon Silko; Dorothy M Sayers; Rebecca Solnit or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

Share the post "I might have been ten, eleven years old–I cannot say for certain–when my first master died. No one grieved him"

10/10/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:364 |

Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.

They Came Like Swallows; Where the Dead Sit Talking; A Perfect Hoax; A Lucky Man: HP Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural; The Mezzanine by William Maxwell; Brandon Hopson; Italo Svevo; Jamel Brinkley; HP Lovercraft (Kind of); Nicholson Baker; Wolf Solent;

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This post comes to you from the stack of books I decided I would read at school while my students read, and then donate them after.   They Came Like Swallows – 4/5 Stars This short novel from 1937 is about a family in Illinois in 1914-1918 or so amid the First World War, and then the outbreak of the Spanish Flu. This is story is told in a third person narration, but closely aligned to the perspective of first the youngest brother, Bunny, then the older brother, Robert, and finally the father. These tight perspectives help to illustrate the […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Purchase They Came Like Swallows; Where the Dead Sit Talking; A Perfect Hoax; A Lucky Man: HP Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural; The Mezzanine by William Maxwell; Brandon Hopson; Italo Svevo; Jamel Brinkley; HP Lovercraft (Kind of); Nicholson Baker; Wolf Solent; or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

Share the post "Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love."

10/10/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:358 |

Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they’re the pinnacle of evolution?

Rubyfruit Jungle; The Anubis Gates; The Third Hotel; Gun Love; Basic Black with Pearls; The Power; W or A Childhood Memory; Foreign Affairs by Rita Mae Brown; Tim Powers; Laura van den Berg; Jill Clement; Helen Weinzweig; Naomi Alderman; Georges Perec; Allison Lurie

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Rubyfruit Jungle – 4/5 Stars So I didn’t know much going into this novel except that it’s seen as an early and fairly beloved novel about growing up gay as a woman. So in MY mind, that meant some stolen glimpses at girls, some little caresses, and other subtle moments that read pretty clearly through a contemporary gaze. Turns out this book was published in 1970 or so and is SUPER GAY. What is super gay? Well, I guess I don’t know how to answer that at all except to say that this book is unafraid to be blunt and […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Purchase Rubyfruit Jungle; The Anubis Gates; The Third Hotel; Gun Love; Basic Black with Pearls; The Power; W or A Childhood Memory; Foreign Affairs by Rita Mae Brown; Tim Powers; Laura van den Berg; Jill Clement; Helen Weinzweig; Naomi Alderman; Georges Perec; Allison Lurie or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

Share the post "Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they’re the pinnacle of evolution?"

9/18/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:351 |

Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon.

The Talisman by Stephen King; Peter Straub

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This is a trope-filled fantasy novel that lives and dies by its uses of said tropes. It’s a road novel and it’s a novel that has the best and worst that Stephen King has to offer. I have no clue what particularities Peter Straub brought to this one because I don’t know his work at all and there’s so much Stephen King in this one it’s hard to separate. I did like this one a lot and think that it could make a very interesting and good tv show. It would be a bad movie since for the most part […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Purchase The Talisman by Stephen King; Peter Straub or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

Share the post "Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon."

9/8/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:343 |


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