Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago–I was twenty-three…

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

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CBR12Bingo – Fresh Start This is the first Nathan Zuckerman novel and the only previous ones I’ve read were The Human Stain in which he plays the narrator, but not the protagonist, and Exit Ghost, the final novel that ties up loose ends that I didn’t know existed when I read it. In this novel, we find the older Zuckerman looking back at himself at 23. He’s visiting with a renowned Jewish writer (who wrote and published in Yiddish and was translated into English) who we cannot […]

There was absolutely no reason to get up in the mornings any more.

Slightly Out of Focus by Robert Capa

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Just an absolutely amazing, wonderfully weird, and truly horrifying memoir by the famous war photographer Robert Capa. Everyone knows his work because at the time of writing this book he’d shot arguably the most famous war photograph of all time, the death of the Republican soldier in Spain in 1936. This photograph is how I ended up reading this book as it’s the subject of a lot of discussion in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. So when I started this book, I figured it […]

“Mister Isherwood?”

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

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CBR Bingo 12 – Violet This is an often very funny, ultimately sad novel about filmmaking in the 1930s. The character Christopher Isherwood narrates this novel (and if you have read others of his work you’ll know how he does with this). He’s tempted into a writing job, to work on a screenplay, by an old friend of his family. When he arrives, thinking that he wants to turn down the work because of a sense of vulgarity, he begins to change his tune as […]

I became an engineer.

A Single Pebble by John Hersey

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CBR Bingo 12 – The Roaring 20s. A 1955 novel by John Hersey, who is most well known for his small book Hiroshima, a nonfiction accounting of the atomic bombing and for his Pulitzer prize winning novel, A Bell for Adano, this book follows a young American engineer on a boat moving up the Yangtze en route to a job. So Hersey was born and grew up in China, and part of this book seems to be a kind of reckoning with that childhood, but also maybe a […]

Fred forgot three things in a row before he reached the front door on his way to work.

Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

Puckoon by Spike Milligan

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

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Mrs Caliban: 4/5 Stars This is a re-released novel from 1982, so if you’ve seen the cover but didn’t know about it, like me, perhaps you’ll be excused. It has a wonderfully smart and funny tone to the whole thing. We find our protagonist, a married housewife, doing household chores, thinking about the silence of her marriage, when she hears a news report of an escaped water monster terrorizing the town. She goes on, prepares for her day, and after time, the monster finds her […]

I brung Pedro home for Thanksgiving break and tomorrow I have to bring him back to school.

Providence by Caroline Kepnes

Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch

High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Real Sherlock by Lucinda Hawksley

Agent 355 by Marie Benedict

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Providence: 2/5 Stars The newer novel by Caroline Kepnes of YOU fame. It’s…well, it’s not great. There’s so many of the same pieces that made You a good, if goofily rehashed novel, are there, but serving this story they just don’t work as well. The plot here is that a young boy is kidnapped by a former substitute teacher. While he’s missing his best friend grows into her adolescence and loses touch with that connection, but she’s haunted by images of his eyes, his presence, […]



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