Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About jeverett15

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39 years old. New Jersey resident. Fan of mystery novels, classic literature, and non-fiction about movies, television, sports, and American history.

jeverett15's Reviews:

Behind the Fictional Music

Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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CBR11Bingo – Pajiba The genius of this novel lies in the presentation. We’ve all become familiar with the oral history as a narrative form in recent years, whether in magazine pieces or in longer forms like the SNL history “Live From New York.” To a fiction writer it offers a comparatively easy way to utilize multiple narrators, unreliable narrators, differing perspectives and faulty memories. It also allows Reid to quickly characterize each of the seven members of the titular band and the other major characters. […]

Three’s Company

Chances Are... by Richard Russo

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Something I read about Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury has always stuck with me. Faulkner said the novel began with an image in his head that he couldn’t get rid of. I don’t know for sure if that’s what happened with Richard Russo and Chances Are…, but if it did, I have a pretty good idea what that image was. On December 1, 1969 the U.S. conducted a draft lottery for the faltering and unpopular Vietnam War. The draft went by birthdate, the earlier […]

Friends Like These

Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

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cbr11bingo – Listicle: Slate’s Best Books of 2017 After reading and thoroughly enjoying Sally Rooney’s Normal People, I knew it was only a matter of time before I went back and read her first novel. Conversations With Friends is about the interpersonal dynamics between four people: Frances, a young writer at university who identifies as bisexual, her best-friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi, and Melissa and Nick, a married couple ten years older than them that they meet in Dublin’s literary scene. Melissa is a photojournalist and […]

Somebody Set Me Up

The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake

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cbr11bingo – Reader’s Choice, replacing “Two Heads Are Better than One.” Donald Westlake has one of those “writer’s writer” reputations, so I’ve always meant to check out his work. This is one of his earliest novels, originally published under the title “The Mercenaries” and re-issued by Hard Case Crime. The main character and narrator is George “Clay” Clayton, right-hand man for crime boss Ed Ganolese. As Clay and his live-in girlfriend are settling in to bed one night, they are disturbed by a knock on […]

The Shop Around the Corner

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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CBR 11 Bingo – Not My Wheelhouse Halfway through this extremely short novel I was preparing the scathing review I was sure I was going to leave here. A comedy of manners without comedy, a too-precious by half story, the personification of the word “quaint.” All of these were phrases I was planning to deploy with devastating effectiveness. But then something happened. Not in the plot, although there is a slight story here, but in the effect the novel was having on me. Middle-aged widow […]

Executioner’s Psalm

The Green Mile by Stephen King

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cbr11bingo – Reading the TBR. Stephen King can seemingly write a story any way he puts his mind to, and here he is in a decidedly Dickensian bent. Intentionally echoing the serial publication of Dickens’s novels, The Green Mile was initially published in six paperback installments, at monthly intervals. The story itself is told in flashback by an aged former prison guard named Paul Edgecombe, writing from the sunroom of his retirement home. In between dodging a contemptuous employee and spending quality time with a […]



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