Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: yasunari kawabata

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

by Leave a Comment

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 […]

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, ‘the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

House of the Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata

by Leave a Comment

This is a short collection of stories by the Nobel Prize winning Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata who I have previously read and reviewed his novel The Master of Go and another collection of stories. These stories are curious, and a little forgettable, and maybe that’s in part because the opening novella is both disturbing and unsatisfying. It will ultimately probably not stand the test of time because the ideas explored in it are both a little played out, but also gauche in their presentation. An […]

Kyoto, mon amour

The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata

by 1 Comment

On the surface, The Old Capital tells the story of a year in the life of a young woman in post-war Kyoto, who was adopted as a baby by a couple that owns a store for traditional Japanese clothes. By chance she meets her twin sister and through her learns about her own background. Subplots include two young men’s interest in her and also her adoptive father’s troubles with the changes progress is bringing to his world. However, underneath this simple and rather uninteresting storyline […]

The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice.

The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata

by Leave a Comment

This is an interesting and touching novel by the Nobel Prize winner from 1968 Yasunari Kawabata. His win is perfectly well-deserved as he’s a great writer, but I get the sense that the Nobel committee perhaps felt like they missed their chance with Junichiro Tanizaki dying a few years earlier, not necessarily wanting to risk giving the prize to Mishima. And Kawabata became a worthy if modest prize winner. This novel is not wholly a novel, and according to the introduction, was more of a […]

A Classic and a Classic and a Classic

by Leave a Comment

The Picture of Dorian Gray – 5/5 Stars I wasn’t sure I was going to listen to this audiobook or not. I like the era (love Sherlock Holmes) and I’ve read a handful of Oscar Wilde plays, but never his fiction. Luckily, Simon Prebble is a great reader (he narrated The Moonstone earlier this year for me and I like that a lot), and it turns out this is a great novel. It’s interesting because I have a huge schema for what I thought this […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo