Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

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A great collection of short stories by James Baldwin. Generally (if not all of) these stories are near perfect, and a good reminder of how much I really like listening to short story collections on audiobook. The opening story “The Rockpile” is one of those perfect stories (I think “Sonny’s Blues” and “Going to Meet the Man” are the obvious others), begins us with a boy watching his step-brother defy all order to stay in the house and goes to the neighborhood rockpile where there’s […]

The dam’d blood burst, first through his nostrils, then pounded through the veins in his neck…

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

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It’s interesting to me because no matter how incisive, and even painful, and even stark and sharp James Baldwin’s nonfiction is, nonfiction in which I find myself partly the subject as a white man in the US, I tend to find it so clear and so precise that it’s almost light to read. (Stylistically and execution, not subject and tone). But his fiction feels almost miasmic a lot of the time and he grapples to represent the phenomenon of existence in prose. This is not […]

Son of a Preacher Man

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

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CBR11Bingo: Banned Books Sometimes the timing isn’t right. Working my way painstakingly through James Baldwin’s breakthrough novel, I could tell that it was beautifully written, with dazzling prose. I could tell that the story was intensely personal for Baldwin. I have no quarrel with its sterling reputation and its place high up in the rankings of American fiction. But if I’m being honest, I just could not will myself to the end of this novel. After a moving opening section that largely takes place on […]

It Is the Innocence Which Constitutes the Crime

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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This book consists of two letters, one that is addressed to Baldwin’s nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and a longer one that he calls ‘A Letter from a Region in My Mind’. They concern themselves with the history and the state of race relations in the US in the 1960s, both from a very personal and a more general perspective. I put this on my TBR when I read an article in my local newspaper earlier this year, in which they […]

Can You See Me America?

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin

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I heard about the movie, but had no idea there was a companion book to it.   “In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck’s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.” The writing, essays, the photos that […]

A Harlem Love Story

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

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I’d never read any Baldwin before, but he kept coming up in conversations, books, and of course, movies.  I took it as a sign that it was time to read some James Baldwin, and I thought I’d start with If Beale Street Could Talk, just to get to it before the movie, which looks great. First, in case there was any doubt: Baldwin can write.  The construction of the narrative, the careful plotting, the realistic dialogue, the direct but poignant tone.  It was just … […]



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