Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Land Breakers – John Ehle (1964)

The Land Breakers by John Ehle

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A novel that spends several years following Scots-Irish immigrants moving to the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia the late 1770s and early 1780s. This novel follows the would-be “land breakers” whose job it is to not only survive off the land, but also to transform it. For those who live in or around the Appalachian mountains this land is pretty familiar in general. The mountains themselves tend to be wooded, with rocky ridgelines and peaks, some gaps and passes, but sometimes those don’t appear […]

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers

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This recent novel from Dave Eggers reminds me a lot of Nicholson Baker’s novel Checkpoint, which involved two friends meeting up in Washington DC for the first time in years. One friend’s anger, rage, and sadness at the direction of the country (under Bush) had calcified into fossil and he was explaining this to his new friend while also explaining his (ridiculous) plan to kill the president. In this novel, we have a series of dialogs between a man in his 30s and different people […]

A Fan’s Notes – Fredrick Exley (1968)

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

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A brilliant novel that teeters between somewhat kilter and completely off-kilter at times. We begin with our narrator, one Frederick Exley, going to a bar on a Sunday to drink while watching football. Both parts of that event seems equally important. He is completely enamored by both aspects. He’s escaping a bit from his weekly teaching gig, one that he secured by promising the principal he would never create too much of a problem with his drinking, as his reputation preceded him. He goes into […]

The End of the Myth – Greg Grandin (2019)

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

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Although by “myth” Grandin is speaking about the “frontier myth” in a lot of ways this book becomes a very good primer/introduction to understanding manifest destiny, the frontier myth, and American Exceptionalism, as a basic, applied concept. Although all of these ideas come into play conceptually through a lot of founding documents and ideas in writing, this book looks at the ways they were specifically put into praxis along the western frontier of America, and then how that frontier first went overseas in places like […]

Our Malady – Timothy Snyder (2020)

Our Malady by Timothy Snyder

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Using the double meaning of malady, or more so both the figurative and literal meanings of illness and societal ill, Timothy Snyder walks us through a truly depressing breakdown of the failures of the US as a state, especially as illustrated by the response to the pandemic. Admitted to a series of different hospitals in December of 2019 with liver issues, Timothy Snyder got firsthand reminders of the brokenness of the for-profit US healthcare system a few months before that systemwide failure would be front […]

Perfume – Patrick Suskind (1985)

Perfume by Suskind

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I saw the movie version of this novel when it came out and I don’t remember a thing about it. That was good because it meant I enjoyed the book a lot more. We are in the pre-revolution France and there’s a baby born who has no scent. We are told emphatically that his poop still smells, but rather that he exudes no scent otherwise. This will come up later as it turns out that the tradeoff for this is the very fine-tuned ability to […]



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