Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

They were supposed to stay at the beach a week, but neither of them had the heart for it and they decided to come back early.

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

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This is the 1985 Anne Tyler novel which became the movie starring Kathleen Turner, William Hurt, and Geena Davis who won an Oscar for her role. The novel begins with a benighted vacation where the married Sarah and Macon are quickly realizing (or Sarah is) that the marriage is dying. We learn before long that their son, twelve year old Ethan, died more than a year before (shockingly from murder), and they can’t hold on any more. We learn that Macon is a creature of […]

I found the bungalow and rang the bell.

Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary D Wolfe

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One of my favorite memories was when my parents went out of town in 1988 and I went to one aunt’s house and my brother went to another. My aunt took me to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and we talked about it for years. I’ve seen this movie at least two dozen times, I’ve played the absolutely terrible NES game, and now I’ve read the original book. This is not a novelization, but the book this was adapted from. So reading this novel made me realize […]

Hank counted the stack of money.

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes

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This is short crime novel by Chester Himes. This is among his most famous, if not his most famous. I’d previously read another from this series called The Real Cool Killers, that I remember liking, but don’t remember much of the specifics of that book. I did like this one–it’s got a strong and curious voice–and there’s a great wildness to this book. It’s chaotic from the very beginning, involving a money laundering scheme, a pile of cash, two violent detectives, and a lot of shooting. […]

“TOM!”

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

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I haven’t read Tom Sawyer in about 30 years, and the biggest surprise is that I think the book only uses the “N-word” one time, and it’s beyond unnecessary in the novel. Though to the credit of Mark Twain’s penchant for casual bigotry, there’s plenty of other slurs. So I read this as a kid, and I can’t swear to why anybody (I read it in school) thought it was a good idea. The irony is lost on kids, and while it’s actively hilarious — […]

You don’t see what’s right in front of your eyes, she said, but sometimes he did.

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

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A Stephen King story and novella collection (that comes on the heels of another collection not that long before) from 2006. In the intro he says he “doesn’t write that many short stories anymore” which is funny because he’s published like 10 short fiction collections at about 500 pages each or longer. But regardless. This collection has a few longer novella length books like “The Gingerbread Girl” where a woman takes to an almost obsessive running habit as her marriage collapses in the wake of […]

In the middle of a desolate Wednesday afternoon in the last sweltering days of May, a handful of mourners were gathered were gathered in the church dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus in Mobile, Alabama.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell

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This is a short(ish) horror novel from 1981, and was written by the same writer of The Amulet which I thought was really weird and curious, but was also strangely harsh and bleak in a way that wasn’t much fun to read. This one is a lot better in terms of that bleakness. It’s a weird cross between say, Burnt Offerings and maybe a little All the King’s Men mixed in. So the plot here begins with a strange, closed-off family funeral at the end of […]



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