Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Jake

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I love reading! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Jake's Quick Questions interview.)

Jake's Reviews:

Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran

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Unlike Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I wasn’t able to down this one quickly like I thought I would. I had to sit with certain parts of it. It’s more personal and raw than the first one…and just as good, if not better. It’s tough to describe Gran’s writing style. It’s this mix of absurdism, postmodernism and hardboiled. Usually, people who write that way are trying way too hard. For Gran, it’s effortless. And it makes every dialogue exchange an adventure. Sometimes, I […]

When the End Comes

Cult X by Fuminori Nakamura

Cell by Stephen King

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I recently read two books with apocalyptic overtones. Neither were great but both were eminently readable, if weird and unfocused… Cult X * Well then. It’s almost impossible for a book as popular as Fuminori Nakamura’s Cult X to get anything less than a 3+ star rating on GoodReads. A book usually has enough vociferous defenders who give it gratuitous 5s to put it over the top. That this one was hovering at 2.97 when I picked it up was not a good sign for […]

Ol’ Hollywood

Windhall by Ava Barry

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Sigh. Why can’t books like this be easier to review? There’s so much to like about Ava Barry’s debut novel Windhall…and so much that grated on my nerves. I really wanted to push this to a charity first-book-4-star review and I just couldn’t. The book kind of feels like the version of the decaying mansion at the center of the story: beautiful and glamorous but uninhabitable and far past its prime. Probably easier with this one to pull out the old good/bad formula: Good: -The book […]

The Players and the Game

The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

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This is billed for fans of The Wire and I totally get that. I always think that Wire-like books are ones similar to George Pelecanos novels, books I admire more than enjoy. This is one such work. There is a lot to admire about this one. Gene Kerrigan’s prose is smooth and he definitely understands Recession Era Ireland. I got a good sense of what happened over there and how it affected everyone from the moneymakers to the lower class. The set ups to all of the crimes […]

Do You Want to Win the War on Terror, or Not?

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

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When the Cold War ended, a lot of espionage/thriller writers didn’t know what to do with themselves. Tom Clancy, in particular, invented new villains and resurrected old ones for the US to shadowbox with. We were the last remaining superpower and there really wasn’t anything threatening us. And then 9/11 happened. It was like plugging in an electrical socket. Overnight, there emerged a raft of anti-terrorist fiction that both purports to understand Islam (it does not) and/or the Middle East (ditto). It continues today, a […]

Staten Island!

The Devil She Knows by Bill Loehfelm

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For the last 48 hours, I’ve been convinced that something was wrong with me, that the other shoe would drop and I would start thinking about this book differently. I picked it up because it’s the first in a series that was lauded by an author I like (although apparently he read others in the series and has yet to get to this one). The reviews on it were less than stellar but the premise hooked me: overworked bartender falls into political conspiracy Hitchock-style, has […]



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