Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

On the Edge – Edward St Aubyn (1998)

On the Edge by Edward St Aubyn

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There’s a very special kind of American hokum that might be completely unreadable by foreign-born observers. California New Age culture is probably one of them. For one, even to people not from California, there’s something completely bizarre and opaque about it that’s hard to translate even to the Midwest or East Coast. So for a British writer to take a stab at it, especially one not particularly associated with the US (like Christopher Isherwood or Aldous Huxley was) then the job is even harder. The […]

Silence of the Grave – Arnaldur Indriðason (2001)

Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indriðason

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I went back and forth on this novel as I was reading it because of how slim it is in parts, but then how solid it becomes in others. A body in found with some clothes in tatters in a shallow grave. It becomes clear that the body is 70+ years old so the investigation into the death takes a slight backseat to the necessary archaeological concerns. While the body is slowly being exhumed, our lead inspector begins the arduous process of tracking down 75 […]

Let’s Get Back to the Party – Zak Salih (2021)

Let's Get Back to the Party by Zak Salih

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There’s a lot happening in the structure of this novel that demands a little attention first. The novel has a dual narrator, two childhood friends who had a passing to more than passing attraction through adolescence, followed by a long absence in each others lives after college. Now both in their early 30s, Oscar finds himself growing a little weary of the gay dating scene in Washington DC while Sebastian leads a somewhat simpler life as a private school teacher in the Virginia suburbs. Sebastian […]

Knife – Jo Nesbo (2019)

Knife by Jo Nesbo

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I think it might be time for Harry Hole to die. Or rather, that time was a few books back. The novels are becoming more and more of a chore (like The Thirst) or worse, they’re becoming fatal for people around Harry Hole. It would one thing for the books if they were specifically well done enough to carry the weight of the series through a slump, or to traffic too much in schlock and tropes (well, cliches) but the books have the ridiculous self-seriousness […]

Bloodchild and Other Stores – Octavia E Butler (1995)

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler

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This is the second time I’ve read this book, and given that thee stories are linked to endnotes and afterwords by Octavia Butler, it’s a valuable book for a lot of reasons, reading the stories themselves, not always. Butler tells us in the opening introduction that for the most part, she’s not a short story writer. She suggests that a lot of short stories either end up becoming novels, or are clearly novel openings that need to be abandoned, and this collection sometimes feels like […]

One Damned Thing After Another – Jodi Taylor (2013)

One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

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I decided to read this after kind of inadvertently listening to one of the short stories in the series via Audible. It was inadvertent in the sense that I didn’t realize it was part of a series. This is the first novel in the Chronicle’s of St Mary’s which is a kind of blend of Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel, Quantum Leap, Warehouse 13, and some romance genre blended in. Unlike Willis, Taylor is actually British, so the Britishness of this book is not forced […]



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