Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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so far off from what I usually read, and yet it’s the first book of 2023

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

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CW: there’s some off color ism language throughout that the modern day reader is likely to be mildly offended by–as you’ll see below, perhaps reading that helped me in some sense to not go into a spiral of re-evaluation If you, like me, are immediately put off by books that categorically fail the Bechdel test I do suggest you continue, including past the passage where two unnamed male characters talk about their onanism fantasies. This book, for all its glaring “THIS IS NOT FOR YOU”-ness, […]

Broom of the System

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

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Broom of the System – 4/5 Stars This is David Foster Wallace’s first novel, the original draft of which was his thesis. The novel itself is sophomoric, for a first novel (if that’s possible) and both precocious and impressive. At times, it really sings, and at other times it’s too goofy for words and too clever by half. It’s not ever boring, and it’s not ever dumb, but at times it’s very very very young feeling. It’s so clear that in this novel David Foster […]

A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never Do Again (Again x2)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

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The essays in this collection tend to be long, as there’s not nearly as many here as in Consider the Lobster, especially given that this book is longer. But they spend more time. There’s two very good tennis essays, one a memoir essay of playing while a tornado is brewing. There’s a very long discussion of television and postmodern fiction, in which Wallace admits that the ways in which television seems to absorb culture and play around with it makes the job of writing metafiction […]

Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace (2005)

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

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This is a reread from years ago when this book first came out, and I think for the most part Wallace’s nonfiction is going to stick around in our consciousness longer than his fiction. For one, it’s definitely more accessible, but mainly it’s that desire he seems to have to be right on a given topic, but to earn that rightness through clear and sober investigation. This collection is anchored of course by the title essay, and it’s the more famous of the collection because […]

Smile Through the Pain

Oblivion by David Foster Wallace

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A boy is so engrossed in his daydreaming that he misses his substitute teacher having a nervous breakdown in front of the class and possibly becoming a danger to the students. A market researcher reflects on his job during the testing of a new chocolate bar by a focus group, while outside a strange figure is climbing up the side of the building. A couple seeks help in a sleep clinic for the, possibly imagined, snoring of the husband. These are just three of the […]

Plateaus of Spasmodic Weirdness

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

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Lenore Beadsman’s life becomes very complicated all of a sudden when her great-grandmother and twenty-five other people vanish from a nursing home, her cockatiel starts talking without pause, and the telephones at the company she works for go crazy. While looking for her missing great-grandmother, she has to confront other members of her family and her family’s history, and acknowledge the lack of control she has over her own life. Lenore is sort of a blank canvas that others project their needs on, for instance, […]



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