Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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 […]

Grab Bag

In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff

Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka

Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

The Collected Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece Pancake

Child of God by Cormac Mccarthy

Candide by Voltaire

A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman

On Animals by Susan Orlean

The Facts by Philip Roth

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In Pharoah’s Army -4/5 The second memoir by Tobias Wolff (known for A Boy’s Life too) but covering his time in Vietnam. This memoir reads a lot like a Vietnam novel — faint with memories, covering topics, and episodic. It’s hard not to compare it to Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried (a “novel”) and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship me Home (a memoir). In those two books Tim O’Brien likes to hide. There’s a few moments where […]

“We are all of us ill prepared for what is to come”

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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I saw the film No Country for Old Men long before I ever read the book, and it is #2 on my list of all-time favorite movies. I’ve read two other books by McCarthy, Blood Meridian (brilliant but a very dense read) and The Road. Now that I’ve read No Country for Old Men, the movie really did the book justice. While I liked the book a lot, it’s one of those rare cases where I think the movie was a little better. Set in […]

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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This is one of those novels that is in my head as just perfect or near-perfect in execution. That list also includes The Great Gatsby and The Metamorphosis and Heart of Darkness. It may or may have much to say about enjoyment or heights of reading or anything like that but about precision of form and content, and especially economy of language. I define literature in fiction as telling a story in the only possible way. So in this book, and this is a reread for the first […]

They crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge…

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

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This book asks the question: what if we took Lena Grove plot from William Faulkner’s Light in August and made it more grim, grisly, and depressing? This book begins with a girl of 16 giving birth to a child in the Tennessee backwoods. It’s her brother’s child, and after the birth he takes it out to the woods and abandons it. He tells her it died and he buried it, but when she presses him, he tells her he left it. It becomes clear that […]

A Grim Look at the End

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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Maybe because I caught a nasty summer cold and already feel dreadful but this book just left me sad and in tears. I don’t know what else to say except McCarthy wrote a heart breaking book about the end of the world as we know it following a boy and his father. The book moves pretty quickly and sometimes you may get confused about who is talking (there are no quotes) but the book in the end shows you the worst of humanity and sometimes […]



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