Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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How many ways are there to be tacky?

The Tacky South by Katherine A. Burnett, Monica C. Miller

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Popular scholarship seems to be kind of a newer genre; by this I mean essays by trained scholars that are scaled back a bit in terms of scope and depth, and done in styles that people without academic inclinations might find readable. Often, these kinds of works also tend to be on subject of interest to the general public that have something to do with popular culture. The Tacky South is one such collection. The authors of the various essays use sometimes rather different definitions […]

Mixed Grill

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Who will Pay Reparations on my Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Necronomicon by HP Lovecraft

Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

The Iliad by Homer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Whores for Gloria by William T Vollmann

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Celebration by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Stony the Road – 5/5 Stars Yet another book that presented answers to questions in part, but mostly added to my reading list, this slight book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. was written to support a documentary and to provide additional resources, analysis, and insight into the post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods in the US. For a more robust understanding of the Reconstruction era, Gates points us to WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, which was one of the first extensive histories […]

The Innocents Abroad – Mark Twain (1869)

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

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Like almost all of Mark Twain’s books (though the novels tend to be more focused, and I don’t generally like his short stories), this book is at times the funniest thing I’ve ever read, and other times either a little boring, a little too mired in contemporary reference, or a little meandering. This book is also pretty long, so combined with those other possible issues it can be a little trying, if rewarding as well. It’s 1866 or so, and Mark Twain decides to take […]

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain

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CBR12Bingo – Friendship This is probably the tenth or so time I’ve read Huckleberry Finn, but the first time I have read it directly after reading the Adventure of Tom Sawyer, which changes things a little. Having re-read Tom Sawyer just previous to this, the very first thing that stands out is how much more the book seems to want to be doing. Tom Sawyer is about childhood and lampooning both the ways we talk about childhood, treat children, and write about childhood. Huckleberry Finn […]

“TOM!”

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

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I haven’t read Tom Sawyer in about 30 years, and the biggest surprise is that I think the book only uses the “N-word” one time, and it’s beyond unnecessary in the novel. Though to the credit of Mark Twain’s penchant for casual bigotry, there’s plenty of other slurs. So I read this as a kid, and I can’t swear to why anybody (I read it in school) thought it was a good idea. The irony is lost on kids, and while it’s actively hilarious — […]

It was nine thirty on Christmas Eve.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

Time and Tide by Frank Conroy

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow

Inside Stories by Ben H Winters

The Dark Web by Geoff White

Latin History for Morons by John Leguizamo

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn

Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Inadvertent by Karl Ove Knausgard

This Land is Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich

Dr Doolittle by Hugh Lofting

Texts from Jane Eyre by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

Tom Sawyer Detective by Mark Twain

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Here’s a whole bunch of kind of (Sorry) short reviews for short books! Pandemic reading!!!     The Woman in Black – 3/5 Stars I still think it remains a little silly that this movie had Daniel Radcliffe in it. He was too fresh off of Harry Potter and hadn’t yet made his real transition into adult movies. I think his show “The Young Doctor’s Notebook” was a more successful vehicle for him as it placed him in a transitional role. Anyway, I mention all […]



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