Cannonball - Book 1

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, edited by Ben Karlin

Originally the plan was for Amanda and I to start Cannonball on February 1st, but we got impatient and decided to start early.  So our year of reading starts today and I am already finished my first book!


I decided to start off with something light, to get my confidence up.  A short book of funny essays was a perfect choice.  I breezed right through it.  The book is a series of essays (the topic of which is explained pretty succinctly in the title) by comedians.  Most of the essays were pretty good, some were not so good, some just made me feel uncomfortable*.  The nice thing about a book like this is that, because the pieces are so short (there are 47 of them, in total), even when I was not really enjoying one of them I knew that I would be getting to a new one soon.  It makes it easy to just keep on reading.


One of the things that worries me most about this whole endeavor is that I am a person who is prone to abandoning books halfway through.  I have never understood people who, once the start a book, insist on finishing it no matter what, even if they hate it.  My sister does this, and it is a quality I find simultaneously admirable and infuriating.  I am not at all interested in reading books that I will not enjoy (although I will often set books like this aside and hope that I will be able to enjoy them someday, when I am smarter and more focused and my tastes have evolved), but I also don't want to be labeled a quitter, even though that it what I am.  I am a book quitter.  


Or, at least, I was a book quitter.  I can't really afford to be one anymore.  The rules of Cannonball do not permit half-books, and I did not think far enough ahead to include them in my amendment of the rules of Cannonball.  I am doomed, for the next year, to finish what I start.  Wish me luck.


Page count: 221
Up next: Open, by Andre Agassi




*In fact, the only thing that really made me feel uncomfortable was Dan Savage's downright gruesome description of the female genitalia.  I really would prefer never to think about it again, but suffice it to say that the phrase "hairy lasagna" was involved.