Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as […]

Now A Major Motion Picture And Sadly A Common Story on The News

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

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  It has been over 50 years since James Baldwin penned this powerful fiction, yet very little seems to have changed. If Beale Street Could Talk straddles genres: it is a tender love story between Tish and Fonny, a slice-of-life drama of the 1970s New York Black experience, and a tense courtroom procedural. While some cultural references have aged, the catalyst—Fonny’s false arrest by a cop who takes personal offense at his existence—remains as common today as it was then. Baldwin’s prose lifts these characters […]

Sadly Still Relevant

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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James Baldwin writes so beautifully and so incisively. He also writes quite densely, at least in this work of nonfiction (compared to the two novels I’ve read by him). His writing style made it a little hard to fully absorb and retain what he was saying. However, I was certainly able to take away how little has changed in the 60+ years  since Baldwin published this. For example, he writes about how police officers’ treatment of Black individuals affected him: “. . . all police […]

A punch in the gut, but make it literary

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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I expected this book to be about sexuality and Paris, in the way perhaps that A Moveable Feast is, or any of the other million Paris-based love stories. Honestly, I should have known better.  It is kind of about sexuality!  But it’s also about so many other things that by the end of the book I had stopped thinking about it as a love story at all. On the second page or so, we already know that our protagonist, David, is in Paris, but about […]

Can I Just Say “Wow!” and Leave It at That?

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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What an incredible book. I knew from reading If Beale Street Could Talk that James Baldwin was a good writer, but it is rare for me to appreciate a book on just a literary level. The prose, the symbolism, the way it’s so clear what the narrator is experiencing even though he himself is hiding from his feelings—it was phenomenal. Written in the 1950s and set in Paris, the novel follows narrator David through his relationship with Giovanni and the aftermath of its ending. We know from […]

“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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There is no American truth teller like James Baldwin. I always come away from his writing–whether fiction or nonfiction–changed. I don’t know how he could hold so much clear-eyed rage and pain alongside so much love and dignity. He never spared anyone from the truth, even himself. His book The Fire Next Time is a short book with only two essays, but he packs so much into them. The first essay is a letter to his nephew, called “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew […]



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