Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Roads – Larry McMurtry (2000)

Roads by Larry McMurtry

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Within this book, you would find a really stellar reading list of American fiction and nonfiction, something I might put together and add later. This would make this already a worthwhile book. One of my favorite articles from the last few years is a list of lists (of books, to read) pulled from within novels and memoirs not ostensibly about reading books. This includes things like Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman and Jo Walton’s Among Others, both of which list dozens of books read by […]

Paradise – Larry McMurtry (2001)

Paradise by Larry McMurtry

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Something about the early 2000s and about male writers born in the 1930s that wants to write a biography of one’s parents. I think about the John Williams novel Stoner, about a kid who grows up in rural Missouri on a farm, gets sent to college to learn about agronomy and economics, falls in love with Medieval literature and never looks back. There’s that kind of maybe guilt, maybe sense of responsibility built into these kinds of biographies. And I can think of quite a […]

Halloween Party – Agatha Christie (1969)

Halloween Party by Agatha Christie

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A late, almost very late Hercule Poirot novel (the 39th! according to Goodreads) and while I don’t think the material is wearing down just yet, in that way that Agatha Christie’s last novels did, it raises some interesting questions. For one, while Halloween, like the other holidays are a part of our lives, they have this way of feeling in literature, and especially in movies, and ESPECIALLY in television of being part of a gimmicky holiday special kind of thing. So the fact that we […]

Straight Man – Richard Russo (1997)

Straight Man by Richard Russo

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Just an absolutely earnest and hilarious campus novel about a temporary English department head of a small central Pennsylvania state college (I am thinking Penn State Hazelton on this one). The novel takes place in the various memory of and primarily in the long weekend of William Henry Devereaux as his wife is off to Philadelphia for a job interview. We find out a lot about this weekend over time as we find out more about Hank. He’s the son of a very well-known English […]

Beguilement – Lois McMaster Bujold (2006)

Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Book 1 of the fantasy tetralogy “The Sharing Knife” by Lois McMaster Bujold. According to other reviews the intent here is one long book broken into sections, which does make sense because of how expository this book feels ultimately. Something I gathered from reading her other fantasy novels, the Five Gods book, and even The Spirit Ring, is that Bujold, as much as she loves writing adventure and military fiction and science fiction, the appeal in her fantasy novels often swerves toward romance and especially […]

Texas by the Tail (1965) – Jim Thompson

Texas by the Tail 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. Texas by the Tail A con man who can make the dice what he wants to do most times out of ten is working his […]



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