Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

I’d been waiting for the vampire for years when he walked into the bar.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

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Dead Until Dark – 4/5 Stars It’s impossible to read this book and not think of the show. So I will be reading this book and thinking about the show. The main reasons for this impossibility involve a)I have seen like 6 seasons of the show and it is by far the way I think about these characters, this setting, and these stories. b) The show is clearly a very solid adaptation of the books, at least this first one. c) There are some reasonable […]

The devil can be a man or a woman.

The Listener by Robert McCammon

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This is a pretty new noir/supernatural suspense novel by Robert McCammon, author of Gone South, Boy’s Life, and Swan Song among others. We are placed in the middle of the 1930s post Lindbergh kidnapping, as we are reminded of. And we are following a man named Pearly (Partlow) who is a wandering grifter. Seeing him fail one good time, and then seeing him meet another con artist, Ginger, we come to understand that this will be a con book. The two decide to kidnap a rich New Orleans […]

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

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So there’s apparently two editions of this book out there and my copy is the originally published one, finished by Fitzgerald, and reviewed while he was still alive. He apparently left some notes about changes he could make, and Malcolm Cowley made those changes, and I am generally against such actions, so I am glad, I unwittingly read the original. The novel takes place on the eastern end of the French Riviera, near Cannes it seems, and involves two main storylines that come together initially […]

Bremen left the hospital and his dying wife and drove east to the sea.

The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Art of Literature by Arthur Schopenhauer

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The Hollow Man – 3/5 Stars This is not the basis of the Kevin Bacon movie, and we’re all the better for it. This book, which I think is filled with some issues throughout, is very compelling and interesting, even if I think the driving narrative behind it is relatively weak over all. Jeremy Bremen is a telepath and a mathematician, and we find him on the worst day of his life, as his wife has finally succumbed to the cancer that had been killing […]

The room was small and shabby.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

The Fog by James Herbert

The Influence by Ramsay Campbell

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

The Dark Country by Dennis Etchison

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

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The Man Who Went up in Smoke – 4/5 Stars This is the second of the Martin Beck books, and I’ve read about half of them now. This follows up Roseanna, the first of the books, and a strong entry into the series. I think this book is also quite strong, and like the other books in the series seems to be laying the groundwork for a lot of the ways these books have been so influential over the years. In this book, we follow […]

When Cal comes out of the house, the rooks have got hold of something.

The Searcher by Tana French

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Like The Witch-Elm, this book feels like Tana French is taking the (very successful but still present) formula of the Dublin Murder Squad books and twisting and playing with it, and the results with both this novel and the previous one, is a more subtle and literary effort. If Witch-Elm is what the Murder Squad books are like from a suspect’s point of view, this book moves out from the first-person perspective to a very close third person, and the effect of this change is […]



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