Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late – Harry Kemelman (1964)

Friday the Rabbit Slept Late by Harry Kemelman

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Just a strange little blend of a Chaim Potok novel, a non-Catholic JP Powers story, and an Agatha Christie mystery. This novel begins with a discussion between a couple members of a Jewish congregation and their rabbi. They are looking for a resolution on a conflict. The rabbi offers to hear their situation and offer his opinion. He even tells them they don’t have to abide. They tell a story about a ski trip in which one of the men feeling under the weather offers […]

Other Men’s Daughters – Richard Stern (1973)

Other Men's Daughters by Richard Stern

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If the title of this book gives you pause, then the introduction by Philip Roth will probably do so too. (I will say that the title of the novel is ironic in a lot of ways, demonstrating the ways in a man is only able to see consequences of his actions through the impact on other men — which is tied to the ways in which he could understand them if he were to face the same impact). This novel was published in 1973, and […]

Mixed Bag II

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

How it Ends by Rachel Howzell Hall

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

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Mapping the Interior – Stephen Graham Jones – 3/5 Stars This short novella by Stephen Graham Jones takes two familiar genres, or sub-genres, and puts them together in a space that is interesting, if limited. For one, we have a haunting. In this novella, a 12 year old boy becomes increasingly aware of some kind of supernatural manifestation in his house. Through guesswork and experience, he determines it must be the ghost of his dead father. This guesswork leads the book into its secondary genre, […]

450 from Paddington – Agatha Christie (1957)

450 from Paddington by Agatha Christie

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Oh to be friends with Miss Marple where you will either be murdered, be implicated in a murder, or witness a murder. When Miss Marple’s friend sees a man murdering a woman on a passing train, she tells her friend and they begin to investigate who, what, when, and most importantly where. Where did the body go? To help figure this out, Miss Marple hires on a savant of sorts, one Miss Eylesbarrow, who after finishing college crafted herself into one of the most sought […]

The Pelican Brief – John Grisham (1992)

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

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This is the third John Grisham novel, and it’s the first one I remember coming out and being famous, after John Grisham was becoming famous. So it was the first NEW John Grisham being passed around by the adults in my life. It has a similar structure to The Firm in a way of promising something huge in concept and then being much smaller in execution. (The Firm’s big reveal feels so laughably small by the time we get to it, and this one has […]

Fear of Falling – Barbara Ehrenreich (1989)

Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich

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In a lot of ways I was really looking for this book, and I didn’t know it. It’s ostensibly a deep dive into the American middle class, by way of 1990 or so, and it IS this, but it’s really a book about the ways in which the middle class (the perception of it, the reality of it, and the fences put around middle class life) controls so much of our understanding of money in America. If we live in a place now where the […]



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