Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Everybody: A Book About Freedom

Everybody by Olivia Laing

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This looks like a collection of essays, and in many ways it reads like one, but it’s more of a kind of topography study of the life and work of Wilhelm Reich, the people who directly and indirectly influenced, how his ideas and life shaped the modern world, and the different areas that this leads us to. It’s also a personal reflection of gender and experience. The title is of course a pun, and the subtitle “A Book about Freedom” has multiple meanings to it. […]

Frankly, the news was making me crazy.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing

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This is an essay and review collection from Olivia Laing who is mostly known for her other nonfiction works, but also for the recent novel Crudo which fictionalizes the life of Kathy Acker, a very Kathy Acker thing to do. Primarily these essays are short and in response to a specific set of commentary parameters set forth by a publication Laing worked for, but the wander away from this later in the collection. The collection is mostly concerned with art, photography, film, and literature criticism, so […]

A Journey Into a Very Neurotic Time

Crudo by Olivia Laing

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“In this atmosphere it was becoming increasingly hard to feel real.” Oh, Olivia Laing, you barely knew! I wasn’t sure if I should read this book at first, since I have been avoiding books that could increase my anxiety during these times. I was fully subscribed to escapism and erotica for a while there, but even that became exhausting. So I picked up Crudo, which I had been meaning to read for years. And it was exactly as I had imagined it—though the protagonists wedding […]

People weren’t sane anymore, which didn’t mean they were wrong. Some sort of cord between action and consequence had been severed.

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Crudo – 4/5 Stars This book has a central conceit that I think is less good and less necessary to the novel as a whole than the quality of the writing. This is a novel that unfolds across about two weeks in summer of 2017 as the narrator, who is fashioning herself as the writer Kathy Acker dealing with the lead up to her wedding. So it’s hard to capture the writing of this novel, but it feels a little like auto-writing and spends a […]

I lack the deep well of literary understanding

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Yup, this is another one where my lack of in-depth knowledge on the source topic definitely left me stranded. Some post-read googling has taught me a bit about Kathy Acker, but oh man am I still so confused. She was an experimental novelist and post-modern writer, per Wikipedia, who died in the 1990s – but this book is supposedly about her/from her perspective and is set in 2017. Which is I guess experimental in its own right and therefore lives up to her legacy? Or […]



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