Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Me and Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust – Loretta Lynn (2020)

Me and Patsy Kickin' Up Dust by Loretta Lynn

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A new short memoir by Loretta Lynn ostensibly about her friendship with Patsy Cline. It’s an enjoyable book to be sure, telling a version of the story that is told in the previous book Coal Miner’s Daughter, and the movie too, and other versions that are out there. It’s a friendship memoir, and it falls into one of the prefigurations that these kinds of memoirs sometimes fall into. It’s not one of those one-sided memoirs where you start to get the impression that the writer […]

Kaputt – Curzio Malparte (1944)

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte

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Not a reportage from within Nazi Germany, but instead a secret memoir of a reporter who becomes increasingly more and more disillusioned with Fascist Italy. It’s hard to place a modern morality on Malaparte’s position in this book except to say he’s risking everything to write this book. It was published in 1944, and he smuggled it on his body repeatedly through his travels around the warfront. He also does spend time in an Italian prison afterward. So his closeness to the information (there’s a […]

The 99% Invisible City – Roman Mars (2020)

The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars

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Based on the podcast 99% Invisible, which takes a close look at planning and design decisions that do or don’t work, that control the world around us, that are intentional or unintentional, and the various motivations that go into them. The podcast is really successful because each episode is relatively short (10 min or so on average) and they hyper focus on the specific element. An episode might look at bench design in cities, a specific building in a city, a bridge, etc. Sometimes they […]

The Train was on Time – Heinrich Böll (1948)

The Train was on Time by Heinrich Böll

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This first novel by Heinrich Böll, who would later win the Nobel Prize, begins with a German soldier in World War II waiting for a train in Poland that will be taking him to the Russian front. You can guess from the title of the novel, that the punctuality of train is ominous. He begins with a clear premonition that he is going to die as a result of this trip, and that he is going to die very soon. There’s a gross scene early […]

Kingsblood Royal – Sinclair Lewis (1947)

Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis

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This is an odd 1947 novel written by Sinclair Lewis. He died a few years later and this is one of his last novels. At it’s heart, it’s a social novel that has a “point” but in addition to exploring the conceit of the novel it meanders a lot. I don’t usually say this, but this novel should be about half as long as it is. The plot involves an American family of Scottish ancestry living a smallish, but establish town in the Midwest. The […]

Nonfiction Shorts II

The Coming Storm by Michael Lewis

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara

Playing to Win by Michael Lewis

You are Ready for Takeoff by Susan Orlean

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The Coming Storm – Michael Lewis – 4/5 Stars This is a short essay/exploration of the topic of weather, the national government, and the use of data. Michael Lewis begins with the idea of how the government collects and stores data, and by this I mostly mean the kinds of data employed in government policies, administration, and the like. The easiest way to explain this in a broad way is to look at how little data was used in the prediction of weather until after […]



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