Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

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The basics: Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the story of a few prominent Russian families around the period of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Roughly, the first part is fancy dinners and balls as the Russian elite try to make sense of Alexander’s liberal policies and the role of Napoleon in Europe. The second part is about Napoleon’s military exploits in 1812-1813. The last part (roughly 20%) is the aftermath. Even though my version is 884 pages of small print, ultimately I found it fresh and […]

Choose this day whom you will serve.

The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not as Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life by Leo Tolstoy

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I took a long, weird road to this book. I grew up in Texas with public-service-minded parents of faith. I was a political science major turned public-interest lawyer turned political staffer. Public service, making the world a better place, all of it. In my mind, Jesus’ line about rendering to Caesar what’s Caesar’s meant that, in my democratic context, I had to work the system for good. I navigated the classic political argument of the “problem of dirty hands” with all of that in mind […]

It was early spring, and the second day of our journey.

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

The Beggar by Naguib Mahfouz

The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz

Autumn Quall by Naguib Mahfouz

Deed of Trust by Claudia Allen

Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts by JMG le Clezio

Fire Down Below by William Golding

Cult X by Fuminori Nakamura

The Long Valley by John Steinbeck

Being the Change by Sara K Ahmed

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The Kreutzer Sonata – 4/5 Stars This is a strange murder story by Leo Tolstoy in which we find a man who murdered his wife for having an affair (having caught her in the act) and then in acquitted. I am not spoiling this story for you at all because all of this is told to you in the first few pages. But what comes out of this telling is more about the nature of his crime and how he found himself in the position […]

Whole Bunch of Tolstoy

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This is a collection of “short fiction” by Tolstoy – some are like 8 pages, and some are like 200, so choose your words appropriately. For a couple of years in a row, I read Tolstoy during the weeks of state-wide testing in May at school. It’s a nice way to kind of decompress during the otherwise hectic part of the year. This year I have spent the fall reading this collection, and so who knows what I will read during testing.   The Raid […]



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