Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Ragtime – EL Doctorow (1975)

Ragtime by EL Doctorow

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Apparently there’s a plot in this book, but I am not convinced. This is a kind of kaleidoscope novel in which everyone in 1906 just knows everyone, and they’re all the famous ones. So you have Harry Houdini crossing paths with Evelyn Nesbit (famous murderer) and Emma Goldman and JP Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt and Emiliano Zapata. We center on the family of a local financier and a jazz musician and things happen and maybe they happen? But for me this feels like something empty […]

They are coming, Mattie, they are marching.

The March by EL Doctorow

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The 2005 novel that looked like it was going to sweep the Pulitzer and National Book Awards, and then didn’t. It lost the National Book Award to William Vollmann’s truly amazing novel Europe Central and the Pulitzer to Geraldine Brooks’s March (which is diary novel written by Mr March, from Little Women, during his time in war — a book that is so much better than that description lets on). This book is fine. It’s biggest issue through is that it wants to tell small stories (like […]



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