Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Grab Bag

In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff

Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka

Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

The Collected Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece Pancake

Child of God by Cormac Mccarthy

Candide by Voltaire

A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman

On Animals by Susan Orlean

The Facts by Philip Roth

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In Pharoah’s Army -4/5 The second memoir by Tobias Wolff (known for A Boy’s Life too) but covering his time in Vietnam. This memoir reads a lot like a Vietnam novel — faint with memories, covering topics, and episodic. It’s hard not to compare it to Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried (a “novel”) and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship me Home (a memoir). In those two books Tim O’Brien likes to hide. There’s a few moments where […]

Philip Roth Round Up

I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

Deception by Philip Roth

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I Married a Communist – 4/5 Stars The second in the so-called American Trilogy which finds both Philip Roth and his sometimes alter ego Nathan Zuckerman reflecting on their own pasts and also the middle part of the 20th century. The Zuckerman novels tend to be fairly naval-gazing affairs and very episodic. The American Trilogy all put Nathan in the passenger seat as he talks with friends and acquaintances about their stories. The first, American Pastoral, deals with Nathan meeting back up with an old […]

Our Gang

Our Gang by Philip Roth

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I have had some very strong feelings at various times in the last 20 years or so, and while I do love political satire, I have to admit, there’s some truly terrible and bizarre political satire out there. Sometimes you get something wonderful like Veep, or you get something that maybe begins as satire or something like and grows into something more substantial like All the King’s Men and Billy Brammer’s The Gay Place. But other times you get something like Ian McEwan’s deeply embarrassing […]

Some bad men

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

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Journey to the End of the Night – 4/5 Stars This one is a bitter pill. Not for me, but for the writer and character. I don’t know how much of this is a roman a clef, a veiled memoir, or a persona allowing the writer to hide within the text. But the novel itself is drenched in sarcasm, irony, cynicism, and disgust. We begin with our narrator finding his way into the army right near the beginning of WWI. This of course is not […]

Philip Roth stuff (I know, I know!)

The Counterlife by Philip Roth

The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth

The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

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The Counterlife – 4/5 Stars Philip Roth seemingly spent his 1980s making further sense or at least writing about what it means to be Jewish, not just in the US, which many of his 50s, 60s, and 70s books dealt, but what it meant to be Jewish in the world. The Counterlife specifically helps to sort out, not necessarily the answer to that question, but to clarify and state precisely the question itself. I am looking back though now, actually to see exactly when the […]

More odds and ends

The Hummingbird's Gift by Sy Montgomery

Stitches by Anne Lamott

Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross

Insurrecto by Gina Apostelo

The Grass Dancer by Susan Power

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth

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The Hummingbird’s Gift – 4/5 Stars Mostly a published long essay, but still a compelling story about hummingbirds in general, but specifically those hummingbirds that become abandoned, injured, lost, or otherwise in need of human care to be rehabilitated and brought up to health enough to be part of natural life again. In this book, we find out that hummingbirds exist upon a series of contrasts. They are quite small, but fierce fighters. In the descriptions of the fighting from this book, two birds locked […]



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