Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Thirty five hundred at Saks-Fifth Avenue.

Good Behavior by Blake Crouch

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This collection of stories that would become the tv show starring Michelle Dockery is pretty bad. Sometimes the plotting is bad, sometimes the writing is bad, and sometimes the overall presentation of the story is bad. So the collection itself is three relatively short novellas or regular to medium length short stories that tell the story of Letty Dobesh, a professional thief (especially pickpocket) who has addiction issues (meth). In the first story she is robbing a hotel room via a master keycard when she […]

This invention will change the course of man.

The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson

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There’s so much wonderful humor and insightfulness and pop culture awareness in these cartoons, and looking back through them, I really just how much The Far Side is one of my humor and culture touchstones. There were plenty of brand new cartoons here that I either never read before or am reading for the first time in 30 years. But then there will a whole section where I recall in detail not only reading before but the contexts in which I read these as a […]

These chapters put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature into what I hope will be a

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

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I am sure I made the same point when I reviewed Toni Morrison’s collected nonfiction last year, but reading a well-known fiction writer’s nonfiction, especially as it bends toward literary or cultural analysis is fraught. On the one hand, I think that a writer’s vision of fiction (as a reader) is often passionate and alluring, but when they wander into analysis and interpretation is often falls apart. My point here is that Toni Morrison’s does not fall apart. In one essay she mentions AS Byatt […]

How old do you think Miss DeGroot really is?

The Other by Thomas Tryon

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I think I thought I knew what this book was all about from its reputation and what cultural products reference it at times. It’s an evil twin novel, and I thought the Simpsons episode with Hugo is at work here. It’s not quite. Anyway, this is a novel form 1970, a thriller, written by a sometimes actor who would go on to have some various publishing successes. This was apparently a giant bestseller, but has probably faded from consciousness in a lot of ways. It’s […]

For a long time the horizon had been a monotonous flat blue line separating the Pacific Ocean from the sky.

Sphere by Michael Crichton

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This is a novel from 1986, and it feels like it. It’s funny though because it’s clearly the book that put us in some kind of mindset for stories in underwater facilities with contact with some kind of force–The Abyss and Leviathan among others. So the story begins almost identically to Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain where an event has happened and experts from a pre-selected team are called together to observe and report on the findings. It’s a classic setup anyway, but here we have a […]

It’s incredible, it really is, isn’t it?

If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien

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Even taking this book on its own, outside of context, it’s a pretty amazing memoir. It’s horrifyingly graphic when it comes to the violence it depicts; it analyzes its own use of language and imagery to decide what does and doesn’t make sense; it engages with both biblical history and American history to make sense of the particular vulgarity of 20th century wars — post WWII — and through an extension of its argument works backwards through all wars; it challenges (imperfectly) the de facto […]



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