Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“A part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there.”

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese

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This was a Christmas present from last year due to my interest in Frank Sinatra and other complicated mid-century men with bad tempers. It then sat for a while until I re-entered my interest phase, which only apparently took about a year. The titular essay is extremely well known as one of the main pieces of “New Journalism” and is hugely influential on celebrity profiles to this day. I used to get Esquire for many years and the profiles all sound like this. It was […]

“the same thing that we’re always seeking when we travel: to get outside of ourselves and imagine new possibilities”

The Best American Travel Writing 2020 by Jason Wilson (editor)

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One of this year’s Read Harder tasks was to read a “Best _ Writing of the year” book for a topic and year of your choice. I had a couple ideas and went perusing through my library catalog to see what I could come up with. And then I saw The Best American Travel Writing 2020 edited by Jason Wilson and the absurdity of these pandemic years meant that this one won out. Consider me intrigued to know what won out in a year that […]

Sedaris’s best collection since When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Happy Go Lucky by David Sedaris

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I approach a David Sedaris book in the same way I used to approach an Eminem album with the question “What has happened since the last album?” In the case of Sedaris it’s “What has happened since the last book?”. Sedaris is a fearless writer, sometimes painfully so, and that fearlessness and willingness to expose some ugly behavior make his writing compelling whether you like him or not. Happy Go Lucky was written before and during (because it hasn’t ended) the pandemic. That would be […]



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