Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

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Somehow, despite being an English major in college and a big reader my whole life, this is a classic I had never heard of or come across. I discovered it in a very weird way, which I’ll detail after my brief review. (Isn’t reviewing classics weird? What else can you add to the narrative?) This finalist for the Pulitzer is a vibrant, gripping meditation on war, specifically, the Vietnam War, and I’m glad it’s been a focus in the American education system over the years, […]

Greatest Hits of Teaching…

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Because I teach the same books each year (sometimes twice a year because I teach different courses with some books that intermingle between the two), I write the same reviews for those books each year for CBR.  I don’t feel like writing reviews for the same books that I read over and over again, I present to you a literary clip show.  Kick back, relax and experience rehashed posts from the past! I promise I have other reviews to finish but here’s what I’ve been […]

I was a coward. I went to the war.

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But this too is true: stories can save us.  I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck.  They’re all dead.  But in a story, which is kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return […]

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, narrated by Bryan Cranston

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700 Sundays by Billy Crystal must be an absolutely astounding audio book because I can’t imagine what it must have taken to beat out Bryan Cranston’s reading of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I was so convinced it was award worthy that I went looking it up and was sadly disappointed. This audio experience was one of the most affecting I’ve experienced, and Cranston’s work is simply masterful. Tim O’Brien, through the way he weaves his narrative as beautifully read by Cranston (I know […]

Stories Can Save Us

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The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a collection of short stories that revolve about a group of soldiers in the Vietnam War.  The most interesting thing about the book to me is that Tim O’Brien is a Vietnam War veteran and he puts himself into the book as a character.  He needs to tell his story, he needs to release the memories and yet, he doesn’t quite want to give a factual account of what happened to him and his friends there.  So […]



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