Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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When I compared them to Naomi, I sensed an unmistakable difference in refinement between those who are born to the higher classes of society and those who aren’t.

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki

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Move over Lolita! But only a little bit to the side. This novel is about a man in his early thirties reflecting back on his pursuing his now wife. He tells us that he fell for her in a kind of way when he first saw her when she was 15 and he was 28. He expresses his own curiosity about why he would fall in love with a child, as her refers to her, but discusses this further by explaining that she reminded him […]

Mizuno always hated getting up in the morning.

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This is a kind of minor masterpiece by the same author as Quicksand, Some Prefer Nettles, Seven Japanese Tales, and The Makiota Sisters. I have read two of his novels previously and a short book on writing as well. This novel is very bizarre and wonderful in a lot of ways, not the least of which because it was published in 1928 and feels both more ancient and more modern than that date would indicate. It’s about a novelist named Mizuno who is publishing a […]

There is nothing more. And yet…

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This short essay lays out a Japanese aesthetic vision about the power of light to create darkness and shadow. Junichrio Tanizaki is writing in Japan of the 1930s, and as I have said in reviews previously of his work, this places him in an interesting and fraught position to argue for Japanese sovereignty and liberation of Western control, while also placing him well within the space of Japanese imperialism over the East Asian continent (especially China and Korea). So in arguing against the influence and […]

Audiobooks and Orphans

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Miss Queenie – 4/5 Stars This is a brilliant follow-up to The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry that came out a few years earlier. Like very few, but very potent sequels, this one eclipses the original. While the original book is heart-warming and touching, something akin to the Straight Story meeting BBC2, this book is downright beautiful and devastating. Harold Fry was about a man who receives a simple and cryptic postcard from a former colleague from the time he worked for a local brewery. His […]

A Man, A Van, Japan: Two Reviews

The Van; Some Prefer Nettles by Roddy Doyle; Junichiro Tanizaki

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The Van – Roddy Doyle – 4/5 Stars This is the third book of the Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle. The previous books are The Commitments and The Snapper. All three take place in a lower class neighborhood in Dublin, Ireland in the 1980s and spiral around various members of the Rabbitte family, a family who along with being desperately poor and loving, seem to have an endless number of kids coming and going. And like the difference between The Commitments and The Snapper, it’s […]



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