Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Cheese – Willem Eslchott (1932

Cheese by Willem Elschott

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A goofy little novel about a industrial record keeper in Antwerp who decides, mostly out of the blue, to pick up the cheese business. What this means is that he gets sold on the idea of becoming a cheese importer, as a side venture, but a sketchy businessman. Because he views himself as quite smart, way smarter than his wife, he quickly signs the contract on the promise of a high salary and potential for more profit. When he tells his wife she quickly realizes […]

All My Friends are Going to be Strangers – Larry McMurtry (1972)

All My Friends are Going to be Strangers by Larry McMurtry

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Part of the Larry McMurtry Houston books, a collection that includes Terms of Endearment and Moving On, this book follows (through the narration of) Danny Deck, novelist and wayward figure who is a kind of shadowy figure in both those other novels. The three novel overlap in incomplete ways, so that they almost tell the same story or same long story in different chunks, with different perspectives. Here, like I said, we have Danny telling his own story as a grad student who gives up […]

Custer – Larry McMurtry (2011)

Custer by Larry McMurtry

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This book is just…not great. The issue comes from the fact that while Larry McMurtry knows a lot, and knows how to tell a great story, he’s not a scholar, not a historian, and gives way to a reproduction to cheap short cuts in his nonfiction too often. He tells you in no uncertain terms that a better, more fully realized, and more accurate and better researched book already exists: Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell. I can’t speak to that book yet, […]

The Kill Off (1957) and A Swell Looking Babe (1954) – Jim Thompson

The Kill Off by Jim Thompson

A Swell Looking Babe by Jim Thompson

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A few months ago, I bought up a bunch of Jim Thompson audiobooks at a good price. This left me with way too many Jim Thompson books. I learned over the last couple that I read that they’re not all as intense and disturbing as the first of his I read The Killer Inside Me and Pop 1280, which is good. The Kill Off This is one of the longer Jim Thompson novels, which is funny because he just doesn’t write long novels, clocking at about 250 pages […]

The Jaguar Smile – Salman Rushdie (1987)

The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie

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In the introduction of this small book of political commentary, journalism, live-history Rushdie, ten years on admits to getting caught up a little in the glitz and glamor of the event. I’ve felt the same when I look into revolutionary movements in countries I don’t understand, where my understanding of it must convert more to almost caricature and flattness, or if I am lucky typology, in the absence of knowledge and understanding. And Rushdie admits for falling a little for the romanticism here. It’s not […]

Sacagawea’s Nickname – Larry McMurtry (2001)

Sacagawea's Nickname by Larry McMurtry

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A collection of essays about the “West” in the broadest of terms by Larry McMurtry, published mostly for New Atlantic in the late 1990s. It’s funny because in a lot of ways this is such a pre-9/11 book, a designation I don’t think about much these days, but was of consequence at the time. A lot of American Studies texts in the 1990s, and this book, while not an academic American Studies book, has the flavor and sentiment of one, and references many of the […]



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