Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Playing catsup

Several Short Sentences about Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich

Girl by Edna O'Brien

You'll Never Believe what Happened to Lacey by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

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Several Short Sentences about Writing – 4/5 Stars I find this small book to be a very clear, direct, and helpful book about writing. As a writing teacher, I find that students generally are unimpressed with the idea that the only way to learn how to write is to write, get feedback, work on writing and go from there. Students want a frame and format to plug in sentences and go from there. That’s not exactly true for students who are more natural in their […]

Fear of Falling – Barbara Ehrenreich (1989)

Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich

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In a lot of ways I was really looking for this book, and I didn’t know it. It’s ostensibly a deep dive into the American middle class, by way of 1990 or so, and it IS this, but it’s really a book about the ways in which the middle class (the perception of it, the reality of it, and the fences put around middle class life) controls so much of our understanding of money in America. If we live in a place now where the […]

It was nine thirty on Christmas Eve.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

Time and Tide by Frank Conroy

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow

Inside Stories by Ben H Winters

The Dark Web by Geoff White

Latin History for Morons by John Leguizamo

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn

Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Inadvertent by Karl Ove Knausgard

This Land is Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich

Dr Doolittle by Hugh Lofting

Texts from Jane Eyre by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

Tom Sawyer Detective by Mark Twain

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Here’s a whole bunch of kind of (Sorry) short reviews for short books! Pandemic reading!!!     The Woman in Black – 3/5 Stars I still think it remains a little silly that this movie had Daniel Radcliffe in it. He was too fresh off of Harry Potter and hadn’t yet made his real transition into adult movies. I think his show “The Young Doctor’s Notebook” was a more successful vehicle for him as it placed him in a transitional role. Anyway, I mention all […]

Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence…

Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Tent by Margaret Atwood

Tiny Crimes by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

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Natural Causes – 3 Stars This is Barbara Ehrenreich’s muckraking polemic on the death industries. Kind of. It shares a lot of similarities with Jessica Mitford’s classic book(s) The American Way of Death (and The American Way of Death Revisited, which is probably the version to read these days), but rather than focusing on the funeral industry, which this book hardly mentions, the focus is on the prolonging of life that especially Americans put themselves through. This books covers health food, health fads, exercise, medicine, […]

How did I do as a low wage worker?

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

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This is an interesting and unfortunately always timely book. The concept of this book is that longform research journalist and commentator Barbara Ehrenreich goes “undercover” in some leading service industries in order to look into the issues with minimum wage, housing, and other personal economic issues facing a lot of lower income workers in the USA. She chooses three areas of the country (Florida, Minnesota, and Maine) and three industries (waiting, cleaning, and retail) to look into these issues. She finds, to no one’s surprise, […]

Two Yellow Books

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Snark Whatever. Apparently a lot of people really hate this book. I came across a lot of criticism of it, but very little of it actually dealt with the book itself instead of their perceptions of the book. I learned of this book, though I don’t recall this now, from reader the famous Gawker essay “On Smarm” by Tom Scocca that was making the rounds about 4 years ago. I am convinced from rereading big sections of it, especially the David Denby parts, that the […]



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