Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Beast Must Die – Nicholas Blake (1938)

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

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A mystery novel masterfully told that begins with a diary by a crime writer whose son has recently been killed in a hit and run accident. Using the same tools that pepper his novels, he is able to track down the killer, although he can’t prove it. Instead, he inserts himself into the life of the suspected killer where he learns about his imperious demeanor, his controlling mother, a wife who feels abandoned, and a son he points all his abuse toward. Our narrator finds […]

The Atmospherians – Alex McElroy (2021)

The Atmospherians by Lex McElroy

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A recently disgraced online life coach (ish) influencer and her longtime childhood friend start a cult aimed at teaching men how to rehabilitate themselves from a full life being immersed in toxic masculinity. The world is our world, except recently, among other things, ‘man hordes’ have begin to spontaneously form where unquestioned tropes of manhood get played out by catatonic men. Whether it’s chopping wood, saving kittens, hurling bricks through windows, or ritualistically killing themselves, the hordes play out male-ascribed tropes en masse. That’s just […]

Time for the Stars – Robert A Heinlein (1956)

Time for the Stars by Robert A Heinlein

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I never quite know if I am going to really enjoy a Robert Heinlein novel going in or not. I also never quite know where the novel is going to break on the weirdness scale. Similar to other writers that he influenced, like say Philip K Dick, his novels often circulate on a conceit, but then take it to some truly strange places. The Sixth Column took a futuristic guerilla warfare novel and ended up creating a new religion. A similar blasting off from the […]

The Name of War – Jill Lepore (1998)

The Name of War by Jill Lepore

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I’ve mentioned before that if you’re not from New England (I am not) the amount of New England history you get (at least in other parts of the US) is relatively limited. Here’s a case of where even within New England the history of this war is relatively untold, told from one specific direction, and plenty is misunderstood. Using recent poststructuralist thinking to guide her, Jill Lepore to find ways to narrate the history of this war, while discussing the specific difficulties contained in the […]

You Love Me – Caroline Kepnes (2021)

You Love Me by Caroline Kepnes

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Joe from You is probably the closest we get to Amy Dunne in millennial male form, and even though he’s a serial killer, he’s a fun character to have and share books with. It’s not a perfect closing to these books (I am not entirely clear we’re done here, but it ends in a most satisfying way), but I think we’ve covered quite a bit of territory skewering white liberal alternative space pretty well. We started with East Coast intelligentsia, moved to Hollywood, and now […]

The Unwinding – George Packer (2013)

The Unwinding by George Packer

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I didn’t exactly know what this book was heading in, except that it was a new history of the previous 40 years or so in the United States, a time period that covers a few years before I was born until my early 30s. The book is written as a series of people’s histories focusing on both large figures and small figures, while trying to avoid the “biggest” political figures. So we end up getting sections of stories that do look at and cover major […]



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