Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“‘They’re shooting the party scene outside at night,’ I was told.”

I Used to Be Charming by Eve Babitz

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This is a kind of omnibus collection of nonfiction, personal essays, analysis, interviews, and odds and ends from Eve Babitz famous for being a novelist and fiction writer, for playing chess with Marcel Duchamps while naked, and for being associated with a host of different people throughout the 60s and 70s. I have read two of her fictional works and I liked them just fine, but I really like this collection. It’s weird and free-wheeling in some great ways. There’s a bunch of really wonderful […]

Eve Babitz

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. by Lili Anolik

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I had never heard of Eve Babitz until Joan Didion and/or Jia Tolentino wrote about her. If you stand out to those two, you automatically have me on board as an eager learner. They speak of her  as an artist and writer with respect and some distance, like a mythological folk hero. She’s somewhere in between Eddie & The Cruisers and Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel, I guess? Anyway, I wanted to learn more about this Hollywood aristocrat. Unfortunately, Eve Babitz’ many books are […]

Sex, Drugs, and Really Good Writing

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I can’t remember where I heard of this book, and I’m not sure how it ended up in my shopping cart, but I’m so glad it did. I wound up listening to the audio version during my commute (in L.A., which is fitting), and the match of Mia Barron’s voice to Eve Babitz’s words seemed just perfect. I don’t know what Eve Babitz sounds like, but Barron did an amazing job of making me feel as if I were listening to the author. Eve Babitz […]

I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony

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You Think It, I’ll Say It – 4/5 Stars You’ll see in my second review here that I was going to start this one off with a book I really didn’t like, but then luckily I read a book I really did like. Curtis Sittenfeld rubs people the wrong way sometimes and she also sometimes rubs people the right way. I think a major reason for this is that this book is a pretty accurate portrayal of middle-class whiteness without apology toward or away from […]



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