Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Jake

CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR17 Levels

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

Jake's Reviews:

A Writer’s Life

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito

by Leave a Comment

So it turns out that the story of Jim Thompson’s life reads much like a Jim Thompson tale. And like many Jim Thompson tales, it’s really good and sadly tragic. I don’t know how a person can do better at connecting an artist’s life to his work the way Robert Polito does. In covering the events that formed Jim Thompson, Polito brings up ramblings and characters from Thompson’s body of work that obviously influenced the man. Jim Thompson’s one of my all-time favorite writers so […]

Devil’s Night

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus

The Crow by James O'Barr

The Transgressors by Jim Thompson

by Leave a Comment

Happy Halloween! Preceding this Devil’s Night, I had a full day off and caught up on a lot of reading. It was a relief to get these three off the TBR list. All were good in their own respective ways. Blood Sugar 3 stars “A” for effort on the language, which is written in the slang of what Daniel Kraus thinks is a modern day teenager. I found it too distracting. But much like Nico Walker’s Cherry, when I was able to get used to it, […]

Pandemic Through My Generation

Severance by Ling Ma

by 1 Comment

I tried to read this gem the first few weeks after the pandemic broke out in New York. Couldn’t do it. As it is significantly better than the other pandemic reads (Killing Williamsburg and Zone One), the fact that it dealt with a terrifying virus from China was hitting too close to home. It took months to work up the gumption to return to it. And I’m glad I did, because it is really good. Yes, the focus of it is a pandemic ruining the world. Shen […]

Best Buds

A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle

by Leave a Comment

My William Boyle journey has been an interesting one. I’ve tried to read Gravesend three separate times with no success. They have the feel of those George Pelecanos style character-driven crime tales that I feel like I should enjoy more than I do, in part because the writer is too close to their home territory to let the story breathe. At the beginning of the pandemic, I finally sat down and finished The Lonely Witness, which I found to be fine but lacking, aside from a great protagonist. […]

Behold…

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

by Leave a Comment

I’m not an Agatha Christie expert. She’s an excellent writer, quite talented at setting up clever, puzzle box mysteries. But as I’ve said countless times, the whodunnit has never interested me much. I’m more interested in the whydunnit. I do believe aspiring mystery writers need to read her in order to hone their craft. But I’m not a diehard. The English countryside whodunnit really isn’t my thing. However, I saw this one was a standalone (the only recurring character is a mystery novelist one that […]

BadFellas

Murder Machine by Gene Mustain & Jerry Capeci

by Leave a Comment

Kind of wonder what could have been if Martin Scorsese had gotten his hands on this book before Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy. This is Goodfellas, only if the murder montage was like half the movie. I knew the name Roy DeMeo and that he was the head of perhaps the most murderous crew in Mafia history but I didn’t know exactly what is story was or how it operated. On a bit of a mob kick, I finally picked this one up. It’s a brutal tale and both writers […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo