Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Deep Thoughts With Jack Gladney

White Noise by Don DeLillo

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Jack Gladney is obsessed with death. As a professor of Hitler Studies, a field he pioneered, death plays a large part in his career. But he’s also obsessed with his own death. He and his fourth wife Babette frequently discuss which of them will be the first to die. Their conversations about death, and all other matters really, are circular and esoteric. They continue to be so even after an ecological disaster (very similar to recent real-life events in Ohio) makes the prospect of death […]

White Noise

White Noise by Don Delillo

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This is another reread. I first read this book in 2003 or so when I was in college, and while I enjoyed a lot about it, I can’t say I understood much beyond the weird story. There’s a Beckett-like element at play within this novel, as so many of the fat-rendered glut of modern life is broken down into elemental language that gives us both narration and dissection at the same time. It’s like a mid-century suburban novel written by a robot. Our narrator is […]

First mixed bag of the year!

Love Story by Erich Segal

In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner

Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

Masscult and Midcult by Dwight Macdonald

Running Dog by Don Delillo

Chronicle in Stone by Ismael Kadare

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowksi

Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

War in Val D'orcia by Iris Origo

Through Blood and Fire at Gettysburg by Joshua Chamberlain

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Love Story – 2/5 What do you say about a 50 year novel that feels dead on arrival? This is the novel that became the movie that is often referenced, and seldom watched. The novel is fine. It’s depressingly fine. Our narrator goes to Harvard, meets a girl, they get married, he goes to law school, she gets sick, and she dies. In the middle he loves her father, because he hates his father. His parents mildly but not so mildly disown him (lucky), and […]

“Why follow me to higher ground? Lost as you swear I am Don’t throw away your basic needs Ambiance and vanity”

Great Jones Street by Don Delillo

Smoky Joe's Cafe by Bryce Courtenay

The Divine Comedy by Dante

The Junkie Quatrain by Peter Clines

The Eye of the World by Robert Jones

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Gone to Earth by Mary Webb

Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny

The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens

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Great Jones Street – 3/5 Stars This is an early Don Delillo novel that is ostensibly about a rock musician who seems to be in his mid-to-late 30s, living in a hotel on Great Jones Street in New York City. I don’t know a ton about New York, but I did happen to see Great Jones Street this summer, and these days, it’s a relatively bland and corporatized street in lower Manhattan. In the novel of the novel, it’s a little more sinister feeling, but […]

Thanksgiving Short Books

The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nahisi Coates

Buck by MK Asante

Yellow-Back Radio Brokedown by Ishmael Reed

Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara

The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes

The Double Helix by James Watson

Pafko at the Wall by Don Delillo

Williwaw by Gore Vidal

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

The Mahe Circle by Georges Simenon

The Hand by Georges Simenon

The Engagement by Georges Simenon

Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The Promise by Damon Galgut

Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk

Gerald's Party by Robert Coover

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The Beautiful Struggle – 5/5  Stars I never taught in Baltimore City, but I did teach in Baltimore County, where Ta-Nehisi Coates spends part of high school. (I was two schools over, but the idea was pretty much the same there). So the result is some familiarity here. If I ever met Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think what I would want to tell him is when I was brand new to Baltimore, so when I scheduled my meeting with the MVA (DMV) I went to the […]

End Zone – Done Delillo (1972)

End Zone by Don Delillo

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CBR13Bingo – Sports Ball Probably the sneakiest anti-Vietnam book I’ve ever read, and this includes Norman Mailer’s pretty sneaky anti-Vietnam book “Why are we in Vietnam?” If you look up American literature during the Civil War, there’s not much there. Sure, Melville and Whitman wrote some war poetry, there’s still a lot of journalism, some essays and poetry, and while the Civil War becomes the focal point of American literature for about a century after, nothing stands out as too connected to the war years. […]



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