Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Bull from the Sea – Mary Renault (1962)

The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault

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This is the sequel to The King Must Die a book I’ve read twice now, and generally think is a brilliant retelling of the Theseus myth. This sequel follows Theseus in his ascension to the throne of Athens, two marriages, many adventures, and son, and ultimately to his death. And for reasons that hard to pinpoint, I found it boring and disappointing. The stakes of the first novel feel very high throughout the whole of it starting with the impending death of sentence of being the […]

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (2001)

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

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This is a novel that I loved when it first came out (when I was 21), and it has only grown in my estimation. The dumber parts feel less dumb (and mostly just more random), and the some of the parts I didn’t understand became sharper and clearer. It’s not too shocking that I decided to reread this book after both my mom and my mother-in-law were at their “Boomer Mom” worst this Christmas. My mom was uncharacteristically better behaved in general, but kids in […]

Rabbit, Run – John Updike (1960)

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

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I read this book and its sequels (three more novels and a novella) for a grad class about 15 years ago, and I am returning to it out of curiosity, and as I look into some other John Updike books we didn’t get into for that class. John Updike is pretty much a rorshach test in a lot of ways, not in the sense that it’s indicative of your test or sensibility, but in how he allows you to address the very heart and problems […]

The Bogey Man – George Plimpton (1968)

The Bogey Man by George Plimpton

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Not exactly part of a series, but part of a kind of book that George Plimpton wrote early in his career, this book involve George Plimpton, amateur golfer, mixing it up with pros for a month. Mostly this book functions as a kind of insider/outsider piece of sports journalism, really attempting to show just how truly different being world class at a sport is from being a good amateur. But in the hands of Plimpton, the book works to shed light not just on the […]

Bro – Vladimir Sorokin (2004)

Bro by Vladimir Sorokin

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So what is this book about? Great question! No clue! Well, not entirely true: so we have our narrator and protagonist born (I think) on the night of the Tugunska Event, in which a meteorite crashed in the far-flung parts of the Siberia, and according to the book at least, I’d have to fact-check, did not actually impact, but created a forced that flattened millions of trees in the vicinity. Years later, our protagonist is uprooted as his family is killed during the Russian Revolution. […]

Ragtime – EL Doctorow (1975)

Ragtime by EL Doctorow

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Apparently there’s a plot in this book, but I am not convinced. This is a kind of kaleidoscope novel in which everyone in 1906 just knows everyone, and they’re all the famous ones. So you have Harry Houdini crossing paths with Evelyn Nesbit (famous murderer) and Emma Goldman and JP Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt and Emiliano Zapata. We center on the family of a local financier and a jazz musician and things happen and maybe they happen? But for me this feels like something empty […]



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