Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

James and Phyllis were spending a wonderful holiday in space.

Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle

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The oddest thing about this book is that it’s by the same writer as The Bridge on the River Kwai and that he’s French. My American chauvinism scoffs at the idea that French-speaking astronauts would land on the Planet of the Apes and teach them French! But alas, what makes this book much more interesting than the movie, although the movie’s plot is not all that different, is that it takes its time. Our narrator is the first-person account of who would be Charlton Heston in […]

I am a copy editor.

Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer

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This is new explanatory language book about grammar but more so, usage. It’s written and in the audiobook read (to good effect) by Benjamin Dreyer, a copyeditor for Random House and prolific Twitter user. If you don’t know him, you might recall his call for editors to tweet about their specific pet peeves that led to a fun and playfully controversially list a few years back. He begins the book with a set of caveats about how this book is neither authoritative nor exhaustive, explaining […]

Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another innings unscratched, one! two! three!

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

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This is a fun and fantastic book that immediately sent me to wikipedia to read up on Role Playing Games. In the opening chapter we find ourselves immediately in a close play by play narration of a baseball game, a potential perfect game thrown incredibly by a rookie pitcher on the night his retired baseball legend father had been honored. As we slowly make our way out of the game, we pull back to realize that what we’re actually watching in the inventive imagination of […]

In the beginning there was a river.

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

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This is the Booker Prize winning novel by the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, and while he was still only about 30 when it was published, it’s his third published novel. It’s one of the longer Booker Prize winners at over 500 pages (Sacred Hunger, The Luminaries, Wolf Hall, Possession, The Blind Assassin) and it takes place sometime in the 20th century in a country that seems a lot like Nigeria, but is not named. The book has a cosmology to it that involves reincarnation, parallel […]

We are a family that has always been very close in spirit.

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

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I first read a John Cheever story in college, “The Country Husband” which remains as funny and weird as possible. I might have learned who Cheever was in the same way as a lot of people, through his weird side-jokes in Seinfeld. But I only can confirm that after the fact. Anyway, even hearing John Cheever read a story is to literally hear the old New England patrician 20th century voice come out with incisive criticism of a world that is clearly fading out. Even […]

Why is London like Budapest?

Wise Children by Angela Carter

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This is a fantastic novel and is Angela Carter’s final novel. It’s also the first novel of hers that I’ve read, having only read her short fiction (with mixed feelings) before this. Here we have the narration of Dora, who along with her identical twin sister Nora, find themselves on the 75th birthdays in about 1990 looking back on their life in the theater, the burlesque stage, and at their family history. The novel has a complicated structure, that if this were a class, we […]



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