Cannonball Read 11

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Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

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The title of this review is a quote from the novel to explain the place, our narrator, arrives in a form of political imprisonment where exiles are back in time to a middling university in the late 1950s. It also perfectly defines the novel itself. This is does not even have a lot of potential, but it does have a few small interesting ideas. For one, it’s interesting that the narrator seems to be addressing her contemporary context as an audience instead of us. But that’s about where it ends. It’s dreadfully weak-tea of a novel and the language she […]

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2/8/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No: 76 |

I hope this isn’t how I’ll be going on.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

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I’ve been seeing the phrase “start as you mean to go on” flying around a lot as we collectively, tentatively tiptoe into 2019. 2018 was an utter disaster for me, and although 2019 is better so far – touch would, knock on wood, hug wood – I’m afraid of jinxing myself. I can’t say that I’m glad I read Zombie, and I very much hope it’s not how the year continues in terms of reading or anything else. I want to add the qualifier, “It’s not a bad book,” but what makes a book bad? I think it’s technically fine, but it’s such a […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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1/22/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No: 1 |

My first memory is of vomiting upon contact with the ginger-drenched air.

The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

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I wasn’t initially sure if I was liking this or not liking this book. The challenge is that like a lot of books written from an immigrant perspective there’s a kind of tendency to write into the novel a sense of totalizing voice, as if this will be the only book ever written about the experiences of, in this case, Ethiopian, immigrants. This book does challenge that structure to some extent by the end, especially given that this book is as much a geopolitical thriller as much as a novel of immigrant experiences. There’s some similarity to Chinua Achebe’s Man […]

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7/14/2018 | Post by

An eyesore, a disgrace: tar-paper shanty with old rusty pieces of tin nailed up any which way.

With Shuddering Fall by Joyce Carol Oates

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  This is Joyce Carol Oates’s first novel, recently re-released with a new cover and new audiobook. I recently read and reviewed her other early novel “them” and found it more or less ok but mired by some issues regarding pacing, tone, and plotting. And the same is true here. Let me start by explaining why I keep reading Joyce Carol Oates. I am chasing a dragon. I LOVE her short story “Where are you Going? Where have you Been?” I think it’s virtuosic and weird and dark and sinister and wonderful. And then when I read other of her […]

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5/15/2018 | Post by

I’m burning the rabbit hutch myself–it’s mine to burn up!

them by Joyce Carol Oates

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This novel is presented to us in the opening section and author’s introduction from its publication as a “history in novel form” which may or may not have truth to it. (I am dubious about it myself). And there’s a strange middle section that lasts about ten pages where a main character in the novel (there’s mostly two, but kind of a third) writes a series of letter to “Miss Oates” (ie Joyce Carol) as if she were a former student reflecting back on college courses and looking for guidance from an old professor, in this case expressing frustration and […]

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4/16/2018 | Post by

Hello!

The Man without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates

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I am more or less live-blogging this one a little bit, so my feelings on it might change as I go. I do not dislike this novel, and in fact, in some ways I think it’s perfectly good. The story is about a research neuro-physiologist named Margot Sharp who spends her lengthy career working with an amnesiac named Elihu Hoopes. It is repeatedly insisted throughout the novel that she is a doctor, in the sense of a scientist, but not a doctor, in the sense of a physician. This distinction is important for the novel because one is the observer […]

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4/12/2018 | Post by

Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

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So Marilyn Monroe has been dead for more than 50 years, and so the uncomfortable attention in this novel is long past the subject’s personal pain. And while Joyce Carol Oates’s novel can feel a little ghoulish at times (for example, Arthur Miller was still alive when this came out–although he comes across perfectly nice in this book…not so much for Joe Dimaggio), she is not the first, the last, or the worst to do so. In fact, implicit in this novel is the awareness of the novel itself of the kind of invasive ghoulishness of how we look at […]

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4/4/2018 | Post by

My heart beat hard and furious against my ribs like a fist wanting to hurt

The Sign of the Beast by Joyce Carol Oates

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Amazon released this Kindle Single as a teaser for a forthcoming book from Joyce Carol Oates. I generally love Oates. She makes me uncomfortable in all the right ways, and reminds readers regularly that all manner of person can be a victim and all manner of person can be a predator. This is a fascinating and quick read, almost dream-like in some ways because it is first-person narrative in the head of a young man actively dissociating as a protective mechanism for seemingly numerous traumas. Some of the ways in which he is abused are clear as day, others are […]

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