Cannonball Read 11

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Luzhin awoke fully dressed, even wearing his raincoat.

The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

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This is the young Russian Nabokov’s second or third novel, depending when you start counting. It’s about an aloof child clamoring for the attention of a father (a famous writer) who turns to chess on a whim at school and discovers that he is a grand master in the making. Now consumed with the life of a leading chess master, Luzhin finds himself unable to process the chaotic and unpredictable world outside the game and begins to inscribe the rules and structures of chess onto his external life, with mixed results. There is an early scene in this novel where […]

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6/4/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:312 |

Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel!

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

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This is Vladimir Nabokov’s first English language novel, whereas he previously published 8 or so Russian language novels living in various countries, publishing under a pseudonym, and living the life of a political (but rich) exile. He also grew up learning multiple language including Russian, French, German, and English and so while a departure from his previous novels, it’s still quite in sync with other parts of his life. The novel is written as a kind literary memoir, or more precisely almost as a set of writer’s notebooks as the narrator searches for the title character, Sebastian Knight, his dead […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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5/10/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:250 |

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

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It’s hard to properly write the title for this memoir in the boxes on this site because it has a comma in the title and that gums up the works a little. The title is an apostrophe, telling Memory to Speak. I don’t mean to explain that to you, but for all the years I knew of this title and thought about reading it, I couldn’t ever make sense of it. I read Harry Potter in high school and didn’t the joke of Diagon Alley until I was 30, so… This is ostensibly an autobiography of Nabokov’s first 30 years […]

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5/29/2018 's CBR10 Review No:173 |

Triptych of no real consequence

The Eye; The Shawl; The Breast by Vladimir Nabokov; Cynthia Ozick; Philip Roth

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Philip Roth – The Breast 2/5  Cynthia Ozick – The Shawl 4/5    Vladimir Nabokov – The Eye 3/5     So these three short novels or novellas don’t really have much to do with one another ostensibly, but I read them one after the other on a Friday sick day and thought a little about their connections or rather what connections I might draw on them. To start, I will tell you what each one of them is about. The Shawl starts off in the middle of WWII somewhere in Poland with a mother and two young women of various […]

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2/10/2018 's CBR10 Review No:32 |

It’s gross you guys.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

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Lolita is a narrative that permeates pop culture, in advertisements, references and romanticizing of things that are not okay. This narrative probably originates from the 1997 film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons:   When I was a teenager this novel was a way to live out my own sexuality and confused feelings about adults around me. These adults were mostly male teachers making Humbert Humbert the perfect stand-in. However engaging with this story as an adult is a bit different. It’s gross you guys. Lolita is the story of a man who abducts a child and then repeatedly rapes her while […]

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1/20/2018 's CBR10 Review No:3 |

A fantastic farrago of evil

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

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This book has some serious payoff at the end, and of course a wonderful fake index that clarifies and makes everything right. If you don’t know this one, this is a novel in the form of an academic annotation of a long poem. The poem itself is a 1000 (technically 999) line poem about a pastoral and academic life, love and marriage, childhood, parenting, death. Like what most poems are about, with a kind of erudition and educated set of allusions. The notes on this poem are written by the poet’s friend, an emigre scholar from a war-torn fictional country […]

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8/10/2017 's CBR9 Review No:328 |

Tomorrow all his youth, his Russia, was coming back to him again.

Mary by Vladimir Nabokov

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Something has been lost in the inter-connectivity of the modern world. The distances that used to separate us physically, created emotional gulfs that also separated us. One of the strongest themes in Lonesome Dove is how the actual physical size and landscape of the American West created this kind of emotional distance. Even yesterday as my girlfriend and I were having an unofficial anniversary dinner, we got on the topic of the weeks and months leading up to our meeting three years ago. This isn’t an artificial anniversary for us, merely that we don’t have a specific date. And because it’s […]

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5/18/2017 's CBR9 Review No:205 |

My first recollection of Timofey Pnin is connected with a speck of coal dust that entered my left eye

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

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Here’s an older Nabokov talking about the best American novels: I show you this to get a sense of his voice and his mannerisms. In this short novel, we are introduced to a Russian professor named Timofey Pnin, who immigrated to the US to teach at a small liberal arts college in New England in the 1940s. The novel starts off with Pnin getting a train to report to a conference where he has been enlisted to give a talk. In a way not unlike To the Lighthouse it’s unclear if we’ll ever see him get there, not because of a […]

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5/16/2017 's CBR9 Review No:202 |


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