Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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In search of found time: a short introduction to Proust

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

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How Proust Can Change Your Life is Alain de Botton’s often tongue-in-cheek ‘lifestyle guide’ based on lessons from the life of canonical author Marcel Proust, the author of In Search of Lost Time. Although Proust is a canonical author, I have not yet had the pleasure of reading him, nor was I very familiar with his life and background. De Bouton’s guide is interesting- and somewhat heartening- in illustrating how this great author had an inglorious start, wasn’t very good at getting or keeping a […]

Attention all people who love Jane Austen, I have a good book for you.

Jane Austen: The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly

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I was just sort of expecting a fun book where the author points out passages in Austen’s work that adds credibility to the idea that Jane Austen was a radical thinker for her time. And that does occur here. (Radical, by the way, has a bit of a different usage here, in that it mostly means someone who is open to new ideas, and to rejecting the old if that is the right thing to do. That word has a negative association now that isn’t […]

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life

At the Same Time by Susan Sontag

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Before I read this book I had a lot of name recognition for Susan Sontag (thank you liberal arts degree) but wasn’t that familiar with her actual writing.  At the Same Time is a collection of her essays and speeches, published posthumously in 2007, and comprising three categories: 1) essays about obscure literature; 2) essays about 9/11; and 3) speeches Sontag gave on varied themes (literature, courage, etc.). Given that the major unifying thread for this collection is loose- essay or speech- my opinions on […]

“The House of Fiction Has Many Windows, But Only Two or Three Doors.”

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It keeps surprising me that whenever I go looking for a book on writing, it’s much less a ‘how-to’ and much more a literary criticism of the Greats. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not what one expects when selecting a book called “How Fiction Works.” But Wood isn’t interested in telling his reader to go find a pen, write some words down and assess if they’re any good based on certain literary principles. Instead he presents us with what’s out there in the literary […]

A Fun Collegiate Literature Course in a Book!

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It’s CBR10, YAY! At work, we often have informal lunchtime book exchanges. What a lucky guy I am to work where I work! Knowing my bookworm status, one of my friends handed off How to Read Literature Like a Professor to me, telling me it would change the way I read. She was right, in a very good way! While I have been a lifelong reader and writer, most of what I know about literature comes via osmosis. Besides some very basic freshman-level courses, I don’t […]



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