Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant

vel veeter's Reviews:

The air in the New Zagreb neighbourhood where my mother lives smells of bird droppings.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic

by Leave a Comment

This book has the funny honor of being the last book I got out of the library before March 13th when everything shut down around here, and which I am stuck with until July. My local libraries have suspended all due dates, and like yours, this also means I can’t return books either. I like to get books out of my hands as soon as possible, and I usually over-borrow and return what I decide not to read. I decided not to read this, tried […]

The meme, though, was misleading.

How We Get Free by Keeange-Yamahtta Taylor

by Leave a Comment

This book is several things. It’s positioned against the 2016 presidential election, especially the role that Black women played in this election. Taylor begins her introduction acknowledging the important role while also lamenting the percentage drop in participation. She begins to think through how this shift and this particular language speaks to the broader struggles of her politics. She then gives us a history in the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists who met and created an ethos in the mid-1970s, positioning themselves […]

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a diffi-cult interval for a poet.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

by Leave a Comment

This a short verse novel that takes on a few forms (and like it’s subject could maybe be said to have many faces?). It’s an autobiography of a poet, it’s a novel about a mythical being, and it’s form of mythopoesis that brings that myth into the modern world. It’s not always doing all three at once, and at times jumps back and forth among those different tasks. We mostly are following Geryon, a three headed mythical creature who guards cattle in a far off […]

It’s easy enough to see what people think they’re doing.

The Actual by Saul Bellow

Agape Agape by William Gaddis

by Leave a Comment

So these are two books written by two incredibly famous, talented American (to the extent that Saul Bellow considered himself American) writers nearing the end of their careers, and for Gaddis the end of his life, that are both about 100 or so pages long, were published nearly at the same time and address a lot of the same ideas and issues, focusing on mortality, doubles and doubling, the mechanization of life, the impossibility of representing time in literature, a catalog of language, and various […]

It was nine thirty on Christmas Eve.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

Time and Tide by Frank Conroy

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow

Inside Stories by Ben H Winters

The Dark Web by Geoff White

Latin History for Morons by John Leguizamo

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn

Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Inadvertent by Karl Ove Knausgard

This Land is Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich

Dr Doolittle by Hugh Lofting

Texts from Jane Eyre by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

Tom Sawyer Detective by Mark Twain

by Leave a Comment

Here’s a whole bunch of kind of (Sorry) short reviews for short books! Pandemic reading!!!     The Woman in Black – 3/5 Stars I still think it remains a little silly that this movie had Daniel Radcliffe in it. He was too fresh off of Harry Potter and hadn’t yet made his real transition into adult movies. I think his show “The Young Doctor’s Notebook” was a more successful vehicle for him as it placed him in a transitional role. Anyway, I mention all […]

Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

by Leave a Comment

A great collection of short stories by James Baldwin. Generally (if not all of) these stories are near perfect, and a good reminder of how much I really like listening to short story collections on audiobook. The opening story “The Rockpile” is one of those perfect stories (I think “Sonny’s Blues” and “Going to Meet the Man” are the obvious others), begins us with a boy watching his step-brother defy all order to stay in the house and goes to the neighborhood rockpile where there’s […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo