Cannonball Read 12

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Pandemic Through My Generation

Severance by Ling Ma

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I tried to read this gem the first few weeks after the pandemic broke out in New York. Couldn’t do it. As it is significantly better than the other pandemic reads (Killing Williamsburg and Zone One), the fact that it dealt with a terrifying virus from China was hitting too close to home. It took months to work up the gumption to return to it. And I’m glad I did, because it is really good. Yes, the focus of it is a pandemic ruining the world. Shen […]

Strindberg mansplains it all

Miss Julie by August Strindberg

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In the last season of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the popular lowbrow comedienne Sophie Lennon, played by Jane Lynch, wants to prove her acting chops by starring in a theatre play of Miss Julie.  Despite rehearsal performances that are nuanced, in the actual performance Lennon plays Miss Julie as a variation on her lowbrow alter ego, to crushing reviews.  It turns out that this highbrow/lowbrow collision is one of the main themes of Miss Julie, so Lennon’s portrayal might actually have been a novel approach. […]

Reading the rainbow for CBR Bingo

Butterflies are Free by Leonard Gershe

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Written by Leonard Gershe, who also wrote the script for the Audrey Hepburn film Funny Face, Butterflies are Free is a play that premiered in 1969 with Blythe Danner (Gwyneth’s ma) in one of the starring roles. It was adapted into a 1972 film starring Goldie Hawn and Eileen Heckart, the latter of whom won an Oscar for best supporting actress.  Who knew?!  My background prior to the google search that provided that info was that my parents went to college for performing arts in […]

I’m Just Not That Into Her

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

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This is try number three with Ottessa Moshfegh’s work and I have to finally admit that she’s not an author suited to my tastes, even as I admire her immense talent for writing. She is great at making the banal interesting and describing the internal monologue of the isolated and potentially manic. Her prose is beautiful. I totally get why people like her. But her characters and stories are so relentlessly uninteresting. I would have never imagined a person with this kind of talent could […]

Well, that’s just your opinion, man.

The Seven Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin

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There is no doubt at all that John Ruskin was an odd bird indeed.  But good Lord, the man had Opinions.   In 1848, Ruskin toured northern France with his bride (poor girl), and I assume, earlier Italy.  It was here that he fell in love with (certain examples) of Gothic architecture.  For Ruskin, architecture was the first of the arts, because it was not created by a person, but rather by a culture (his primary examples being cathedrals that took, in some cases, hundreds […]



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