Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Assorted Short Fiction II

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

Yard Work by David Koepp

Anonymous by Uzodinma Iweala

There's a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed by Edgar Cantero

The Remedy by Adam Haslett

Falls the Shadow by Skip Horack

Screwball by Simon Rich

The Beckoning Fair One by Dan Chaon

Q&A by Ben Winters

Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry

Decorum at the Deathbed by Josh Malerman

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Night of the Mannequins – 3/5 Stars – Stephen Graham Jones This is a newish novella from Stephen Graham Jones that you’ll have to roll with the bad title and go with it because it does some very interesting things. It has a significant flaw by the end, and the way I will describe that is that it either doesn’t trust the audience or trust itself to make the more interesting choice. The plot involves a group of teenagers, friends and frenemies, who friend works […]

Assorted Nonfiction I

The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen

A Load of Hooey by Bob Odenkirk

You Do You by Various

Here is New York by EB White

Bad Faith by Mike Daisy

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The Painted Word – Tom Wolfe – 4/5 Stars I haven’t read a lot of Tom Wolfe (white suit, not Southern writer) but he was one of those public figures who was just around in my childhood watching tv. He made a guest spot on the Simpsons for example. This essay takes a look at contemporary art about up to 1975 ending more or less with pop art and photorealism. The essay begins with a paraphrased idea that art used to work: the art drives […]

Assorted Short Fiction I

Nimona (audiobook) by Noelle Stevenson

The Armies of those I Love by Ken Liu

Fashionably Undead by Meg Cabot

Miscellaneous 0125 by Berri George

Zeta Family by Gretchen Enders

Temporary by Hilary Leichter

The Fool Who Thought too Much by Ishmael Reed

Bedtime Stories for Cynics by Various

Escape from Virtual Island by Jon Lutz

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Nimona – 5/5 Stars I really do love this book a lot. It’s so full of charm and joy and fun. It FEELS whimsical at times, and I generally do like whimsy, but it’s a much more tightly controlled and structured narrative than whimsy would suggest. I have owned three copies of this book and have had three copies get “borrowed” by students and never returned. I feel like everyone knows what the book is, but a quick recap. We are in a far-off magical […]

Tourist Season – Carl Hiaasen (1986)

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

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I don’t know what to make of this novel, and maybe it’s a case of well, they don’t make them like this anymore. It’s an oddly rich and literary-adjacent mystery novel, it’s also fast and loose with racist and homophobic slurs (some that serve the narrative, and some that don’t — it’s one thing to have a character who would casually toss out slurs as part of their nature, but there’s also a sign of the times casualness with some of the language that makes […]

Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weschler (1995)

Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

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If you’ve ever been to one of the 826 stores around the country (Superhero Store in Brooklyn, Cryptozoology in DC etc), you’ve sort of stumbled through a version of the Museum of Jurassic Technology that Lawrence Weschler describes here. The difference is that while those stores are storefronts for a local tutoring nonprofit and that everyone is in on the joke. But for the museum of Jurassic Technology, there’s a level of seriousness to it all that adds to the wonder and charm. It’s like […]

Later – Stephen King (2021)

Later by Stephen King

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The newest Stephen King, and I feel like his last couple have been clicking for me in good ways. I don’t think that each of the novellas from If It Bleeds were great, but a few were. I also really liked The Outsider and very much liked The Institute. You can tell from the cover of this book that it’s part of the Hard Case Files series, but like Joyland, and even like his straight-up hardboiled detective novels, the Bill Hodges series, this book is […]



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