Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

So long, pop! I’m off to check my tiger trap!

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

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In the leadup to the election, I was feeling increasingly more and more stressed to the point I could often barely focus. This was already an issue for my physical reading anyway for the last four years, and especially during COVID when I could no longer go read in my favorite coffeeshops for a few hours on Sunday and Saturday mornings. So I needed something that was light, but not too light, and had something energetic and hopeful to say. So I picked this up […]

All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling.

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

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My childhood library had a copy of this movie, and at the time, probably only had 50 videotapes in total, so I’ve seen the cover of this film hundreds of times. Every single time I laughed at the title. I still do. This is also not to be confused with The Russia House, with Sean Connery on the cover. This is a mystery set in Soviet Russia in the late 1970s, and like other good mystery novels, mostly tries to stay away from diving too […]

My first impression were that the stranger’s eyes were of an unusually light blue.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

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The first of the novels packaged together as The Berlin Stories, this novel begins with our narrator (clearly some kind of stand in for Isherwood, though more in the vein of The Single Man than of Prater Violet) noticing a curious man in the train car. The scene is marked not quite with the element of desire, but there’s something to it in terms of being attracted attention-wise to someone standing out. The novel then takes place in the various meetings and events surrounding the friendship between the […]

Carter “Doc” McCoy had left a morning call for six o’clock.

The Getaway by Jim Thompson

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The Getaway – 4/5 Stars If you haven’t read any Jim Thompson before, I think you should, and this might be a solid place to start. Things you generally need to know is that his books tend to be more brutal than you might expect. Plenty of thriller and suspense books don’t “pull punches” but rather than simply not pulling punches, his books follow through on the punches, so there’s often a slight extra layer of brutality worked in. They feel quite a bit more […]

It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

The Day of the Jackal by Fredrick Forsyth

How to Watch TV News by Neil Postman and Steve Powers

The Emperor's Last Island by Julia Blackburn

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

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Day of the Jackal – 4/5 Stars This is a thriller/suspense novel from the English writer Fredrick Forsyth, and is the basis for the film by the same name (and the less less  good film with Bruce Willis from the 1990s). The novel is written in an incredibly straightforward, all facts and no real style (though competently and compellingly), and tells the story of a Right-wing militia group in France planning for the assassination of Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s. The group is […]

In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters.

Shame by Salman Rushdie

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This is Salman Rushdie’s third novel (after Grimus and Midnight’s Children) and this novel takes place in a city called Q in a country that seems an awful lot like Pakistan (and is definitely Pakistan) but which we’re repeatedly told is not Pakistan. The affectation in making these claims is to pose some distance both politically and historically, but also in the storytelling. Because this novel is not historical fiction, and in fact is a confabulation of events and people (however much they seem like real people […]



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