Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I, a person who does not read memoirs, enjoyed this memoir

Just Kids by Patti Smith

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I had hardly ever listened to Patti Smith’s music before picking up this book, and I hardly ever read memoirs, because I find most of them self-indulgent and boring, sorry, memoirists! But this one was recommended to me as a memoir that was “worth it” and it was available from the library. Good news: it was totally worth it! Even if you, like me, are only passingly aware of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorp’s body of work! Smith’s prose is plainspoken and authentic, which makes […]

New York City in the 70s man. You just had to be there

Just Kids by Patti Smith

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Last year I read Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, which takes place in the arts scene in New York in the early ‘70s. Just Kids feels like the novel that Kushner was trying to write, or at least the world she was trying to fit her characters into. The contrast between these two works was really highlighted by how vibrant and desire-filled Smith’s book is- the things that bothered me about The Flamethrowers were the limp, motive-less main character and the pretension of the art world […]



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