Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fiction/Poetry Shorts

The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

The Song of Roland by Unknown

Project Kiwayan by Randy Ribay

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The Magic Christian – 3/5 Stars I don’t know almost anything about Terry Southern except he has a great name and he wrote for the movies in addition to fiction. If you’ve seen Dr Strangelove, you’ve seen some of his writing at work, and he was a favorite of Peter Sellers. In addition, he was more or less loosely associated (at the very least in style and tone) to those post-war waywards like Charles Portis and Ken Kesey. This novel begins with Guy Grand, an […]

Plays

The Sound Inside by Adam Rapp

Men's Health by Daniel Goldfarb

Have a Nice Day by Billy Crystal, Quinton Peeples

Coal Country by Jessica Blank, Erik Jensen, Steve Earle

The Vanishing Negative by Aaron Mark

The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy

A Streetcare Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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The Sound Inside – 3/5 Stars Written by Adam Rapp and starring Mary Louise Parker, this play is about a writing professor who had had some very minor success early in her career with a debut novel, and now almost 20 years later finds herself with no second novel, and worse, terminal cancer. In the play she thinks and talks about multiple topics, but the play is shaped around her interactions with a male student, young in the way she was once young, and fragile […]

Ours

What's Mine and Yours by Naima Coster

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CBR Bingo – Heart, because these characters ultimately have so much love for one another This is the story of two families in North Carolina, spread across multiple decades. The story opens in 1992, on the day of a tragedy that impacts young Gee for the rest of his life. Another family is tangentially impacted by this event, but the stories of Gee’s family and the Ventura’s will come to be more fully entwined throughout the novel. The novel bounces around in time, ending in […]

Rabbit Novels – Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Rabbit Remembered by John Updike

Licks of Love by John Updike

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CBR14Bingo – Body Rabbit is Rich – 4/5 Stars All the Rabbit novels are squarely about two main things: the lives that bodies live and the eclipsing of the white man (according to the white man himself) in American society. In this third novel, which I find to be the most unpleasant of the four (and all are at least mildly unpleasant), Rabbit is around 45 and he’s been working as the manager and head salesman at his now-dead father in law’s car dealership. It […]

If only it were so simple…

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

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The second of my Goodwill finds is The Lorax, a book I’ve wavered on buying from Target for some time now. Back in elementary school, we went somewhere for a Dr. Seuss day celebration and I got this pocket-sized copy of The Lorax, possibly my favorite of his books. In the years since, I’ve lost that copy and have not been able to find a similarly-sized copy. I’m starting to think I made up the whole story. But I knew I wasn’t spending full-retail, which […]

“These creatures have no power to harm you”

The Living Demons by Robert Bloch

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CBR14Bingo: Question (each story answers the question of the story with a twist ending) This is a collection of Robert Bloch short stories that I got from somewhere I’ve forgotten as a stripped paperback. This was an easy train read for the 3 hour journey I was on this weekend. The stories are mainly pulp horror with twist endings. I wouldn’t say any of them were unjustly forgotten in favor of Bloch’s more famous work, Psycho. They read more like they were written with the […]



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