Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bruh.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

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As my kids would say.  A Little Life is a behemoth of a book, focused on the lives of four college friends as they make their way in the world. There’s Willem, attractive and easy-going, who wants to be an actor; Malcolm, an aspiring architect; JB, a promising your artist; and Jude, an enigmatic lawyer with a brilliant mind and a troubled past. We follow their lives as they grapple with fame, addiction, relationships and trauma.  At least, that’s what google will tell you if […]

Three Books and a Bingo

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

The Swimmers by Julia Otsuka

Nuclear Family by Joseph Han

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Today I’ll catch up with some reviews that have been waiting for a bit AND make a complete Bingo across the top row! First up: For the spot Monster, I offer: To Paradise by Yanagihara. I chose “monster” for this book because of its intimidating length (over 700 pages! I don’t read tomes that like very often any more) and because I felt very nervous about reading it after being so utterly destroyed by A Little Life. Well. I can’t exactly say that this book matches ALL […]

I like Turtles.

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I guess it’s impossible not to mention Nabokov on this one. For an obvious reason in terms of a review, and a less obvious one in terms of something I won’t share. But if you read this one, you’ll see. It’s Nabokov, but specifically Pale Fire. By way of Paul Theroux. In this book, we have the main narrative written and narrated by a brilliant research doctor, Norton, at the end of his career. According to the primary material of the text, he is renowned for […]

Slow your roll, Nicholas Sparks

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Lit fic as a category is pretty up its own ass, and many reviews for these books are also up their own asses, in a phlegmy, colonic matryoshka of sycophancy and intellectual pre-ejaculate. I don’t really care to participate in this shitfest, so instead, here’s a bulleted list of what worked and didn’t work about A Little Life. There be spoilers. This was fine * Yanagihara: “One of the things I wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never gets better.” […]

No.

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Fuck this book. And it started out so well! The writing is actually gorgeous. I can see why many, many people like this book. Really, Hanya Yanagihara knows how to use language. Unfortunately, the story she told was not worthy of it. The longer I read this book, the more I dreaded reading it, the worse my feelings got as I read, and the more I hated it for existing. Then I read a bunch of interviews by her and hated the book even more. […]

This Might Be My Book of the Year

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Yesterday I got home from work around 4:30. I was about 300-pages deep into A Little Life and wanted to keep going. Just before midnight, I closed the book. This is a 736 page novel and it was then, amidst the crumpled tissues and empty whiskey glass, that I realized I never even ate dinner. This book had captured me so completely that I sat on my couch for five and a half hours just to finish it. So if you want to know what kind […]



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