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:

The Losers

The Alcoholics by Jim Thompson

Miami Purity by Vicki Hendricks

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I knocked out two quickie noir tales yesterday, both about sad sacks trying to get through life. One I liked way more than the other. The Alcoholics Jim Thompson 2 stars The Year of Jim Thompson continues with one of his more forgettable works. The New York Review of Books described it as “satire with a bludgeon” and I suppose that’s true because I felt bludgeoned by this one. If you like your satire this heavy handed, this one may work. But it didn’t for me. […]

Men Suck

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

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In one of those “I wish I had all the time in the world” fits I occasionally throw, I wish I could learn Japanese. My aptitude for languages is terrible; I’ve never tried learning anything remotely far east Asian. But I want to do it just to read Natsuo Kirino’s amazing books in their original form. Like her stellar work Out, which was one of the best things I read last year and would have been the best thing I read most other years, Natsuo Kirino […]

Quarantine Reading

Conviction by Denise Mina

Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death by Donald Westlake

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Been doing a lot of reading to pass the time during the quarantine. I finished these two books back to back, both were good in their own respective ways. So here are the reviews… Conviction I didn’t mean for this to be my first Denise Mina book. I’ve tried and failed twice to get into Garenthill. But the premise seemed too good to pass up and I thought it would be a fun pleasure read. It starts off rocky. The main character, whose perspective we get first […]

Come Out And Play

The Victory Machine: The Making & Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty by Ethan Sherwood Strauss

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Oh finally, a quality sports book written by someone my age. My kingdom for such a book. Thank you, Ethan Sherwood Strauss. To not have to deal with condescensions such as “Hey, ya know young fella, ol’ Michael Jordan never had Twitter. Larry Bird wasn’t on Facebook. Magic Johnson didn’t mess with the internets. We had to get our highlights the old fashioned way” as if it’s inconceivable that people realize there was a world before they were born. At any rate, that’s a big […]

The Killers

All The Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block

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I really do truly love this series. I didn’t expect to tear through it as fast as I did and now I’ve only got a few to read. Stupid pandemic. I’m also glad I read this series when I did. Had I gone through it in my early-20s, when I read my first Scudder, I don’t think I would have appreciated the solemn nature of Block’s famous detective, nor the shoe leather detective work he is known for. This is in many ways the last […]

Storms A Comin’

The Broken Places by Ace Atkins

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For a long time, I was wary of starting Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson series. I’m not from the south but my dad is and I used to vacation there a lot. I know how often southern folk are caricaturized. I also know how people will write off the south’s racist legacy in favor of being “complex” (looking at you Gregory Iles, although I’ve never made it past 20 pages of a Penn Cage book so maybe he gets better). I assumed Quinn Colson, ex-Army Ranger, […]



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