Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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If the “them apples” guy wrote a book, this would be it.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

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What do Usher and St. Augustine have in common? I enjoyed their Confessions more than Thomas De Quincey’s. (Also, both Usher and Augustine were both great dancers in their prime.) There have probably been books that were more disappointing to me that Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but I can’t think of any right now. Mr. De Quincey’s Confessions first made itself known to me through Nick Tosches’ The Last Opium Den. That book was less about opium and more about the search for something […]

“I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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I am an outlier on this work. Yaa Gyasi writes like a motherfucker and I will continue to seek out her work, but this book just wasn’t for me. Transcendent Kingdom aims for big, heavy topics but its treatment of them never feels more than surface level. This work stands in stark contrast to Homegoing, and while I can see the impulse to go for a different tack there’s such a bare bones approach to the very heavy topics that Transcendent Kingdom attempts to wrangle […]

Too much damage

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

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Osamu Dazai is an esteemed author of classical Japanese literature, but he was a troubled man in real life.  Like a lot of classical Western authors, he squandered his money on alcohol and prostitutes, and ultimately, died by suicide at a relatively young age.  The tortured genius thing is not just a Western trope, I guess. This book, his last before his death, is purported to be fiction, but is almost biographical in how the beats of the story reflect his real life.  So maybe […]

But his laptop!

Beautiful Things by Hunter Biden

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I was not going to read this book, but then I heard Hunter Biden on WTF being interviewed by Marc Maron and I was.. intrigued.  They talked about his book of course, but some details were unclear to me and I felt that the timeline would be better understood (by me) when read.  But what really caught my attention was Maron saying that he was concerned or worried about Hunter still.  You could just feel Maron liking, relating to, and being very worried about him.  […]

“It is very important to approach all unpleasant tasks in life as a performance art piece, especially if you are a teenager.”

Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country & Other Stories by Chavisa Woods

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Goth or not, country or not, if you have ever been a teenager then SOMETHING in this collection of stories will speak to you. Maybe you’ve never befriended a drug addict squatting in a mausoleum, and maybe you’ve never had a bad trip at a MENSA party hosted by your girlfriend’s parents, but there are definitely some teenage feelings rolling dark and deep in all of us! Chavis Woods has labeled and celebrated that feeling of “something more”; most notably in the titular story, “Things […]

“My book-ordering history is definitely going to get me flagged by some evil government algorithm. Lots and lots of books about Vichy France and the French Resistance and more books than any civilian could possibly need about spy craft and fascism. Luckily, there is a Jean Rhys novel in there and a book for Eli called How to Draw Robots. That’ll throw them off the scent.”

Weather by Jenny Offill

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Jenny Offill’s latest exercise in approaching anxiety with compassion, Weather, kicks off right before the 2016 election. While she isn’t that exact- you come to realization through context clues- the time and feeling is accurate and thick in the air. Just like in Dept. of Speculation, Offill packs years worth of pathos into a collection close to just 200 pages. Her economy of vocabulary is something that I strive to possess. Our narrator is worried about wasting time; she sits on an unfinished masters while answering […]



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