Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: Thomas Pynchon

“Is this book written in an alternative version of English? I have no idea what is happening”

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

by 1 Comment

Proving I learned very little from the Intellectual Property law textbook in my previous review, I stole the title of this review from one of the top questions about this book in GoodReads. To your question I saw: I am with you, sir. The other title I considered was “Am I a bad literature major?” Maybe I’ll leave that as a theoretical question, I feel like Pynchon would appreciate that. This is a slender little volume that I think is commenting on conspiracy theories and […]

Against the Day

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

by 1 Comment

Gravity’s Rainbow is a truly difficult book to read, mostly because of the complex language that often clips itself off at various times, paragraphs that go on and on, and a self-referential style that is both dense and ambiguous. To say that this book is significantly easier to read is a way of saying that the language is much more fluent, recognizable, and less dense. That’s not to say that this book is in fact easy to read because while the language is more accessible, […]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the (reading) Weekend…

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg John-Barker, Julia Scheele (illustration)

Widespread Panic by James Ellroy

Quarry's Cut by Max Allan Collins

by Leave a Comment

Read a variety of books close to and over the weekend. Let’s check it out… Bleeding Edge **** This is a 2021 reread and it’s better than I remember. The ending disappoints but it’s still an entertaining, prescient novel. Pynchon warned us about Too Online culture and yet, here we are.   Times Square Red, Times Square Blue **** I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this. And I liked it! Mostly. This is like a tale of two books. It’s two essays […]

In June of 2016 my wife, Jen, and I took our fourteen-month-old daughter, Oona, to the Nantucket Film Festival.

The New One by Mike Birbiglia

My Vanishing Country by Bakari Sellers

Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter

Hey Rube by Hunter S Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Nickle Brickle'Bee by Sterling Nixon

Cold Storage by David Koepp

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The Mark of Zorro by Johnson McCulley

The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

by Leave a Comment

The New One – 3/5 Stars This is the second Mike Birbiglia book I’ve read, after Sleepwalk with Me, and it’s good in the ways that comedians’ books are good and bad in the way that comedians’ books are bad (though this is a general issue with the form more than this specific book). Mike Birbiglia’s career is interesting in part because of the way he clearly got taken up by “Big Storytelling” around 2009 or so, and the opportunities to write movies that came […]

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

by Leave a Comment

CBR12Bingo – White Whale This might be the whalest of my white whale books. Heck, even as far as White Whales go, I have read Moby Dick a handful of times, and while it’s scattered, it’s completely readable to me. So this one though is all over the place. So while I have read this now, there’s a near infinite number of bits scattered all over my brain. To think of it as a complete text feels wrong, in the sense of reading it as […]

I just dunno, man.

by 1 Comment

When I was in college, maybe summer after sophomore year, Thomas Pynchon was gonna be the guy I decided to love and get into. It was initially because his name and the cover of “V” drew me in and I have a fascination for long books and I was just convinced he was my guy. Turns out he’s an incredibly rewarding writer, and an incredibly frustrating writer. So books like V and The Crying of Lot 49 are both pretty frustrating and pretty rewarding. Crying […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo