Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Grab Bag

Mine by Robert M McCammon

Boathouse by Jon Fosse

Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover

The Miranda Obsession by Jen Silverman

Tell Her Story by Margot Hunt

Zaddy by Sarah Ramos

Cuckoo's Cry by Caroline Overington

Dear Seraphina by Avery Bishop

Benarnda's Daughters by Diane Exavier

The Wrong One by Dervla McTiernan

Tisoy by Berneice McFadden

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Mine – 3/5 Stars Ahhhh, 1990. It’s weird to think about how little cultural cache SDS, Weather Underground, and other Leftist groups from the 1960s and 1970s have any more when talked about in media products. This book is not exactly about a Leftist group, but more of a kind of amalgamation of these types of groups, separatists groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army, and even the Manson Family. In Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi describes the Mansons as “Right-wing hippies” and I think, in the […]

Thanksgiving Short Books

The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nahisi Coates

Buck by MK Asante

Yellow-Back Radio Brokedown by Ishmael Reed

Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara

The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes

The Double Helix by James Watson

Pafko at the Wall by Don Delillo

Williwaw by Gore Vidal

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

The Mahe Circle by Georges Simenon

The Hand by Georges Simenon

The Engagement by Georges Simenon

Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The Promise by Damon Galgut

Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk

Gerald's Party by Robert Coover

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The Beautiful Struggle – 5/5  Stars I never taught in Baltimore City, but I did teach in Baltimore County, where Ta-Nehisi Coates spends part of high school. (I was two schools over, but the idea was pretty much the same there). So the result is some familiarity here. If I ever met Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think what I would want to tell him is when I was brand new to Baltimore, so when I scheduled my meeting with the MVA (DMV) I went to the […]

Dice Games

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

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After he gets home from work, 56-year-old accountant J. Henry Waugh entertains himself with a simulated baseball game based on dice rolls and probability charts. As a kid who spent many a rainy summer afternoon playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, the concept was very familiar to me. However, unlike Strat-O-Matic, Henry’s game involves an entirely fictional league. All the teams and all the players on them are his invention. When he plays he rolls the dice for both teams and meticulously records every play on his scoresheets. […]

Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another innings unscratched, one! two! three!

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

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This is a fun and fantastic book that immediately sent me to wikipedia to read up on Role Playing Games. In the opening chapter we find ourselves immediately in a close play by play narration of a baseball game, a potential perfect game thrown incredibly by a rookie pitcher on the night his retired baseball legend father had been honored. As we slowly make our way out of the game, we pull back to realize that what we’re actually watching in the inventive imagination of […]

In a sense, omnipotence is a form of impotence.

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There’s about three or four stories in this novel that function the same way as “The Babysitter”, the most famous and probably best story in this collection. This story takes place on a typical suburban night where the kids are at home with a babysitter, the mom and dad are at a neighbor’s party, and the babysitter’s boyfriend and friend are plotting to come over for some fun. But then the story slices up the various possible narrative threads and plays them all out one […]

What he did not expect was to find himself standing on the night of Saturday the eighteenth—the Night, as it turned out, of the Sacrifice—in a ditch alongside the old road to Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, watching a young girl die.

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This is Robert Coover’s first novel; it came out in 1966. The copy I read was pulled from the library stacks and is a first edition, with a nondescript front cover in brown, with the picture of the white bird you can see in other covers from other editions. This novel begins in a kind of present tense, seeing the quote from my title above, at what becomes a human sacrifice for a religious cult in an unnamed state, but is seemingly the coal mining […]



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