Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Mary hoped that the rotted front tire would not burst.

The Love Object by Edna O'Brien

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A long, but curated story collection by the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who like many who came before her (and I think Mavis Gallant is the best analog more so than an Alice Munro) split a lot of her time writing short fiction cataloging both the local from her own life and the international or cosmopolitan in her travels as a writer. In the opening introduction by John Banville, she is compared to Henry James in her international sensibility, and there’s not much to find […]

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

The Emigrants by WG Sebald

A Place in the Country by WG Sebald

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The Rings of Saturn So this one feels to me less of a novel than Austerlitz did, which already stretches my sense of what is a novel. We begin with Sebald (and normally I am not one to presume an unnamed narrator is the author, especially in novels, and in the case of Sophie’s Choice even when the narrator IS the novelist, by name, but here we even get a picture of Sebald in the text!), walking through the county of Suffolk, and his first stop along the […]

You could say I was thinking of other things when I shampooed my hair blue, and two glasses of red win didn’t help my concentration.

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

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A truly wonderful novel that rewards a patient reader. This novel begins us with Alia accidentally dying her hair with coloring shampoo because she “likes a good lather” and uses way more than recommended. She tells us that she is 72, living in Beirut, and that because her hair is yellowish/white, she wanted a little more white, which gave over to blue by accident. She decides that older women like her like bluish hair tints because with her diminished eyesight, it appears not blue at […]

They are coming, Mattie, they are marching.

The March by EL Doctorow

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The 2005 novel that looked like it was going to sweep the Pulitzer and National Book Awards, and then didn’t. It lost the National Book Award to William Vollmann’s truly amazing novel Europe Central and the Pulitzer to Geraldine Brooks’s March (which is diary novel written by Mr March, from Little Women, during his time in war — a book that is so much better than that description lets on). This book is fine. It’s biggest issue through is that it wants to tell small stories (like […]

Barry Sutton pulls over into the fire lane at the main entrance of the Poe building, an Art Deco tower glowing white in the illumination of its exterior sconces.

Recursion by Blake Crouch

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A pretty good novel that plays around with a concept early that seems like it’s going to be fruitful, but then abandons it for way too familiar territory. In addition to all that, the writing is overwrought in ways that are unsuited to book, and this book is sometimes peopled with incredibly flat, and irritatingly unthinking characters. So we begin with Barry Sutton, an NYPD robbery detective, being first on the scene of a would be suicide attempt. He tries to talk the woman down […]

There was only one bench in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

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An early post-Vietnam novel that was written when not quite a post-Vietnam was post yet. In a lot of ways, this novel feels like a very American, very 1970s sequel to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. We begin in Vietnam where an American war correspondent (free-lance) starts investigating some underworld leads, which takes him to the southeast Asia heroin (and other drugs) trade that punctuates a lot of what happened in the Vietnam war. We find ourselves back in the US at other times. What is […]



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