Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Cranes keep landing as night falls.

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

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Richard Powers hit the big time with his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory a few years back. He also won the National Book Award in 2006 with this book. He’s been writing and publishing since the late 1980s, and there was a while (and still maybe a future) in which I thought I would be a “Richard Powers” guy. A lot of his writing is metafictional and experimental, but plenty of his books are simply complex, if otherwise realistic. This book begins with a truck […]

I get the willies when I see closed doors.

Something Happened by Joseph Heller

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This is a truly remarkable book that I don’t think anybody will like. And that maybe includes me. I can’t recommend it at all, but you could very well get sucked into and be entirely compelled to read it (I did!) and think it’s brilliant and awful, like I did. One of the best thins written about Ulysses is from the US judge that declared that it was unfair to consider it obscene, allowing its publication: that it’s boring storyline is what made it great […]

Maybe it was a suddenly acute awareness of being “thirtysomething.”

Friday Night Lights by HG Bissinger

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I haven’t seen the movie of Friday Night Lights, but I’ve seen the show all the way through and we’re watching it again. I am starting to realize how silly and ridiculous the show is an a lot of ways, because the book is so good and so unsentimental (until the epilogues, where it does get a little emotional and acts as a kind of catharsis). The book begins with Bissenger making his way to Odessa Tx, referred to in Larry McMurtry’s sequel to The Last […]

Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.

Black House by Stephen King

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This is the final Stephen King book for me. I don’t mean I am done reading him, but I have now read all his books. And I think I am pretty close to reading everything he’s ever published. Though I might have some odds and ends from especially epublishing days. Unfortunately, I think this book is kind of awful. It’s the sequel to The Talisman, a book I thought well of but don’t recall a lot of reading it, and this book was almost very […]

The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea.

The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald

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I didn’t really know much about this book going in, but it was referenced in the PD James book “Talking about Detective Fiction” as a kind of inheritor of Raymond Chandler, and in this first book, that holds up for sure. We follow Lew Archer, a former cop turned private detective, as he’s hired to assist on a missing person, a business tycoon in Los Angeles, who has gone missing. His family–a second wife and adult daughter–are worried something has happened to him. A recent […]

The first thing they always did was run you.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

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This book follows Billy Beane, the general manager (money guy, deals, trade, etc) of the Oakland Athletics through a season in the early 2000s as he’s three years in a new approach to baseball using statistical analysis (termed sabremetrics) to have a successful baseball season. Rather than a focus on traditional baseball values and certainly rather than trying to win specific games in micro ways, Beane employed a system of maximizing the benefit of certain parts of baseball, to win as many games over the […]



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