Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Body of Evidence – Patricia Cornwell (1991)

Body of Evidence by Patricia Cornwell

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I didn’t think I was going to be read any more Patricia Cornwell, but then I did. I was drawn back by this book being available for me in an audiobook, and because I still live in Richmond (even though I swear this book and the previous book never feels like it actually takes place in Richmond–I’ll come back to this). The other reason is that unlike other books about the same time, for example John Grisham, there’s a casual prejudice in these books that […]

The Salt Eaters – Toni Cade Bambara (1980)

The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara

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I first read a Toni Cade Bambara story in like 4th or 5th grade with “Raymond’s Run”. This kind of thing happens a lot, where because the story is narrated by a child and the characters are children (a brother and sister) it’s presumed that it’s for children. The rest of the collection of stories, Gorilla My Love, definitely shows that this was not really for children. Reading the rest of the collection in college, I furthered my feeling of who I thought Toni Cade […]

The Blessing Way – Tony Hillerman (1970)

The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman

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This is a mystery novel, that based on the fact of something like 15 sequels launched two careers (of the writer Tony Hillerman, and later his daughter Anne Hillerman, who would pick up the series some 30 years later) as well as the careers of a few fictional detectives/police. It’s clear from this first novel though that there’s some searching for what exactly this novel and this eventual series wants to be. We follow not the police detective through most of this novel but an […]

Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (1996)

Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

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There are some significant ways in which this book feels like an artifact. For one, it and the movie are obviously iconic. The movie came out when I was in college, and I didn’t know anything about the book at the time, so I was a little confused about the hype of the movie, not realizing the book and its sequel were so beloved. It’s also an artifact of both the 1990s book culture centered in London, the same culture that gets lampooned a little […]

The Living Blood – Tananarrive Due (2002)

The Living Blood by Tananarive Due

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Book one of this series spent a lot of time in split narratives (and narrative perspectives), mostly through dramatic irony and flashback. We were getting both Jessica and David, David knowing everything about Jessica, and Jessica knowing almost nothing about David. We also got a lot about David’s past through flashback. For this novel, a few years past the first, we have a much wider range of characters, landscapes and even mini-genre styles. At times this still reads like an Anne Rice vampire novel, but […]

Legacy – Lois McMaster Bujold (2007)

Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Lois McMaster Bujold handles marriages well. In this novel, we already have the marriage of Dag and Fawn, Lakewalker and farmgirl (nickname “Piglet??”), which we witnessed in the first book of this tetrology. Now, we find them returning back to Dag’s hometown, where among other things, he’s going to be presented with the illegality of of his marriage. Recall that Dag is a widower and the father of a dead son, and the Lakewalkers are a clan of strong ethnic ties and traditions, and especially […]



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