Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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

Jake's Reviews:

I’m Just Not That Into Her

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

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This is try number three with Ottessa Moshfegh’s work and I have to finally admit that she’s not an author suited to my tastes, even as I admire her immense talent for writing. She is great at making the banal interesting and describing the internal monologue of the isolated and potentially manic. Her prose is beautiful. I totally get why people like her. But her characters and stories are so relentlessly uninteresting. I would have never imagined a person with this kind of talent could […]

City of Sisterly Love

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

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Parts of this one hit me hard. I’ve lost multiple high school classmates to drugs/opioids. It’s painful. I don’t even really have the words to express some of the sorrow I’ve felt over lives lost. I never looked at my old neighborhood as a place to escape. I was happy there growing up. But times change. At the heart of the book, this is a story of two sisters who take divergent paths. Those kinds of tales usually aren’t my thing, writers often rely too […]

Gone and Forgotten

Have You Seen Me? by Kate White

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Slowly but surely, and of course, unhealthily, we begin to emerge from isolation due to the pandemic. I doubt I’ll be keeping up my book-every-one-or-two-days ratio until the inevitable second wave. So I’m beginning to cast aside the stack of stuff I was going to read to pass the time. This is probably the last one. I got it off one recommendation or another, can’t even remember now where it was. And that seems kind of appropriate because I finished this last night and I’m […]

The Faint of Heart

The Innocents by Ace Atkins

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Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson series has helped me get through the pandemic. I’ve read books 2-6 since covid broke out across the country. They’re easy, gritty southern crime tales that don’t patronize the audience nor do they often give into the familiar tropes of post-western Tough Guy fic. I had this one on the shelf for weeks but I kept putting it off for a very obvious reason: it’s just tough to read about law enforcement right now. Don’t get me wrong, I read plenty […]

This Is The Way

So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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With the requisite qualifications that I’m a cishet white dude reviewing this, please take that into consideration when reading. Call outs are, of course, fair game. Like many Americans, I’ve dug into several books on antiracism in the wake of the uprising following George Floyd’s death. I would recommend them all. They all have knowledge and wisdom for these and all times to both address internal attitudes and reform personal politics around racism. None are quantitatively “better” than the other. But if I had to […]

Damages

Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman

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Patrick Hoffman’s Every Man A Menace was one of the best things I read last year; a layered, eagle’s eye view of a major drug transaction from street level to boss level. I couldn’t put it down and when I heard he was coming out with one that covered corporate espionage in New York City, I wasn’t going to hesitate getting my hands on a copy of it. Clean Hands doesn’t hit those high notes but it’s pretty good in its own right. While its formatted differently […]



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