Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

You don’t wear a wedding ring and I go on.

You by Caroline Kepnes

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I think this book is really successful (not supremely — despite what the cover tells you, it’s not Gone Girl but more so than I would have suspected). But what this really means is that the audiobook is really successful. The narration of Santino Fontana really works here because instead of the deadpan of the show (mimicking Dexter) we get more life. Joe, we realize, is not a sociopath unable to feel anything or even a psychopath unable to empathize whatsoever with his victims. Instead, he is […]

Without claiming races there would be no racing at all.

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

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This is the 2010 National Book Award winner that beat a Peter Carey novel that is likely better (I haven’t read it but it’s well-received) and the Karen Tei Yamashita novel I Hotel which is absolutely brilliant and fantastic. So I don’t know what happened here. This book, when you read about it, sounds great: a down on his luck horse guy has a great idea for one last great score by kind of fixing four races on a single day. Cool, sounds great. Oh, but […]

People disappear all the time.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldan

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I found myself in France last year in an apartment for a week and they had “French Netflix” which mostly just meant that they had less, but different things for us to watch. My wife had already watched season 1 (and maybe 2) of Outlander and so we started where she left off while I peppered her with lots of questions to fill me in on what I missed. I missed a lot and still the show was decidedly compelling. The novel is even more compelling. […]

It was my first day.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgard

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe

McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh

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Lucy – 4/5 Stars I’ve read a handful of Jamaica Kincaid books, and her nonfiction book A Small Place stands out as a kind of collective memoir, nonfiction history from the perspective of someone who grew up in Antigua. This book acts similarly (as well as a similarly to her short stories in At the Bottom of the River) as a way of fleshing out the sparse lived experiences embedded in the more transitory pieces. What this novel most feels like to me is a first person […]

I’ve hated sports ever since I was a little kid.

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

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Gene Yang is most well known for his American Born Chinese and more recently Boxers/Saints. This new book reveals something about him that I didn’t know, that he was a high school English teacher for many years (until a recent move to comics writing full time). He worked for a school in California called Bishop O’Dowd and spends this book chronicling the 2014 basketball season when the Dragons found themselves with the number one recruit in the country (a mercurial and inconsistent ranking system depending on who and […]

Let us imagine that Shakespeare found himself from boyhood fascinated by language, obsessed with the magic of words.

Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt

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This is the 2006 literary historical analysis of Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, but it lost; Greenblatt later won for his book The Swerve, which I haven’t read. This book takes to the historical evidence of the lived life of Shakespeare, provides historical context, and uses his plays and poems to make reasonable speculations or run over an array of reasonable speculations based on the evidence for what Shakespeare might have been like as a person and what […]



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