Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant

vel veeter's Reviews:

“This must be so difficult for you, Meredith.”

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

by Leave a Comment

I read the first chapter of this book when it first came out, and I think probably because of the Stephen King quote at the beginning “It scared the hell out of me” or something like that. I didn’t find it to be all that scary, but I do think the last 25-30 pages are incredibly tense and shocking, so I found that incredibly effective. But for most of the rest of the book, I enjoyed it and found it inventive, but not expressly scary. […]

We are fairly ordinary people, Walter and I.

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddon

by Leave a Comment

Another novel I read because of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre which he reads in that book as a recent (1982 for DM, and 1978 for this novel) example of horror fiction. And I think that this one, still quite well-known, is a bit of a hidden gem, especially given that Anne Rivers Siddon is more known for beachy society books than horror or thriller novels. So this book asks the question about whether or not a house can be created “haunted”? We meet the Kennedys, a […]

Were they truly intelligent?

The Puppet Masters by Robert A Heinlein

by Leave a Comment

What if I told you that even though the famous film and book version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is either about Communism or Fascism depending on who you’re asking, was predated by this Robert Heinlein book? I mean it’s obvious common knowledge, but especially for those of us who really really wanted to watch the obviously terrible 90s version of the film with Donald Sutherand and who weren’t allowed to. But also, the novel is….weird as hell, as happens. For one, it’s […]

One of the fruits of emancipation of the West Indian islands is the number of ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone’s throw of them…

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

by Leave a Comment

One of those books that is always on everyone’s best of the 20th century list and I’ve never met anyone who’s ever read it or heard of it. I read another of Richard Hughes’s books In Hazard previously about a ship wrecked in a storm, and really didn’t like it. This book is much more enjoyable and I think obviously a much better book. We begin on Jamaica in the 1870s and an English family is living their quaint little racist colonial life when a terrible […]

“What are you doing here, little man?”

Auto-Da-Fe' by Elias Canetti

by Leave a Comment

This is one of those novels I picked up and put down numerous times over the years. I think this is mostly because while not expressly long or expressly dense, it’s the right combination of both to be just dense and long enough to feel a little like a chore. And that’s a shame, because I really enjoyed the novel and thought it was quite funny. It just requires some patience. We meet our hero, Kien, a Sinologist with a growing library and an ego […]

He was just tight enough and just familiar enough with the house to be able to go out in the kitchen alone, apparently to get ice, but actually to sober up a little; he was not quite enough of a friend of the family to pass out on the living-room couch.

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Witchcraft of Salem Village by Shirley Jackson

Virgins by Diana Gabaldon

by Leave a Comment

The Lottery – 5/5 Stars This remains one of my favorite books ever, and is one of the very best story collections (published as a collection) that I’ve ever read to.  These stories hang on to each other so well, and there’s a few stories with lightness and levity (like “Charles” obviously, but also “The Witch”) and the obvious and patently sinister ones like “The Lottery” as well as the ones where the sinister edge cuts through only at the margins almost illegibly so. I […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo