Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Coriolanus release the fistful of cabbage into the pot of boiling water and swore that one day it would never pass his lips again.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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The book begins with Coriolanus Snow, 18 year old son of a somewhat fallen house, in secondary academy 11 or so years after the big war. They are soon coming up to the tenth annual Hunger Games, which are not yet the Hunger Games we all know, but barely more than a joyless, punitive bloodbath. For the first time, members of the academy will be selected to act as mentors to the tributes (yes like Haymitch would become) to both promote and care for tributes. […]

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

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A lengthy analysis of city-planning failures up to the 1960s with plenty of lessons for today and beyond. So the book takes on Robert Moses and his ideology more than anything, but also targets the ways in which planning had gotten both ossified (received wisdom) and also reactive (attempting to replicate the irreplicatable). Jacobs takes the question of what makes a successful city and turns it around as a form of analysis, rather than seeking to create rules and principles. What this means is that […]

“The success of a marriage invariably depends on the woman,” Mrs. Greenway said.

Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

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I have seen the movie of this maybe two times, but I think more than once. And so I was a little leery going in given how sad and potentially maudlin this book might end up being. But I always forget well Larry McMurtry refuses to create melodrama (even in his silly books) and how infused with complication and complexity his books are. He remains a very solid writer in general, and he’s very good and spying on domestic relations with a real focus on […]

The shadows flickered on the walls to his left and right, just inside the edges of his vision, like shapes stepping quickly back into invisible doorways.

They Shall Have Stars by James Blish

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This is the first book of a quartet, written in 1956, about space exploration around and beyond our solar system. Like in The Expanse series or say Rendezvous with Rama, humans in this book have colonized the planets of the solar system and have begun to grow stagnant with those achievements. There begins a series of developments that would allow interstellar travel and mass driving capabilities, and moreover, this would allow whole cities to be uprooted and converted into their own spaceships, so to speak. And […]

Begin at the end

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

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The newest novel by Emily St John Mandel finds us at a hotel on a small Canadian island where several characters initially interact. We begin with Paul who has run away from college after accidentally passing along bad E. He takes a job at the hotel where his sister works, and he gets involved in an act of curious vandalism that gets him fired. His sister Vincent meets the rich owner of the hotel and begins what she understands as a transactional relationship with him, […]

At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad…

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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This is a novel that lost the Booker Prize (in a competitive race along with David Mitchell) to The True History of the Kelly Gang. This is also a novel I was avoiding for a long time because it seemed quite likely to simply be more or less like the movie (and in plenty of ways it is), but ended up being a lot more compelling, more serious, and more thoughtful than the film ever hoped to be. If you don’t this book or film, Briony […]



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