Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Having and Being Had – Eula Biss (2020)

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

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This is a kind of essay collection, kind of an essay diary, and similar to autofiction (minus the fiction part) of other writers these days. The book is a response to capitalism, but more so, a trying to reckon with, understand, define, and then process the reality of capitalism in various forms. One of the things that keeps happening in the book is Biss asking someone who should know the answer, to define capitalism, often finding either an almost tautological response, one that has no […]

The Mysterious Mr Quin – Agatha Christie (1930)

The Mysterious Mr Quin by Agatha Christie

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I don’t even know what to do with this one. It’s not bad in most ways, and in fact there’s some interesting and curious things that stand out about this collection of short stories. They’re almost structured the ways that the Sherlock Holmes collections are, where while the stories don’t always feed into one another, they are certainly of a time and of a place. So there’s a kind of cohesiveness in this collection that you get with a Holmes or with a Father Brown. […]

Skippy Dies – Paul Murray (2010)

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

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Probably one of the most rewarding novels I’ve read in a while (and be forewarned is 600 pages, but a “fast” 600 pages), Skippy Dies takes place in a Catholic boys school in a small town in Ireland in the early 2000s. Like a lot of these schools (and this is seen as “one of the best” in Ireland at the time), there’s a history, there’s ghosts, and there’s a lot of drama at the school. In the opening scene, our title character, Skippy, dies at a […]

The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe (1972)

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

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This book is called a novella collection numerous times on the cover and in the promotional material, and well, it’s a novel. There’s a thematic and setting consistency throughout the book that is cohesive and connected in such a way, it’s almost like a publisher told Gene Wolfe that the book had to be called novellas. It’s no less a novel than Go Down Moses (though my comparison stops there). This is my fifth Gene Wolfe book, and I am still a little confused as to whether […]

Artful – Ali Smith (2012)

Artful by Ali Smith

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In an essay and kind of novel form, Ali Smith writes about a writer who begins seeing the ghost of her dead partner, who appears in spectre-form, performing actions, sometimes saying words, and bringing up an untold number of memories. Challenging these images too is the relatively short amount of time that relationship lasted before her partner’s death. This is a meditative and mourning book is beautifully evocative about life, death, what form and presence another takes in our life, and about those traces. It’s […]

Why We Can’t Wait – Martin Luther King Jr (1964)

Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr

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It’s a week since Right-wing American fascists stormed the US Capitol bent on disrupting the certifying electoral votes for Joe Biden, and presumably looking into kidnapping and murdering congress members and perhaps the Vice President. There were other goals as well, some purely emotive and disruptive and others still hidden. In the week since, the Republicans have resorted to embarrassingly craven and intellectually and morally bankrupt comparisons to Black Lives Matters protests from the previous summer. The implied threat of all these comparisons of course […]



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