Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Lord of the World

Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth

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A Turkish spy is living on a Greek island spying for the Ottoman Empire in 1908. He sends small little reports about the comings and goings of the island, and while he thinks and understands that no one reads these reports, he’s vigilant and exact in his reporting. He has fallen in love, and when a curious and mysterious and deceptive Englishman shows up on the island, things begin to spiral for the spy. So this is a novel that I like a lot in […]

Len Colter sat in the shade under the wall of the horse barn, eating pone and sweet butter, and contemplating a sin

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

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In some not so distant future after a nuclear war, humanity lives in primativist small communities to guard against future attack. In the epigraph of the novel we see that there’s been a 30th amendment preventing towns of more than 1000 people. This is to guard against the mass death they clearly experienced, but what this has led to is a lost sense of American identity and the formations of 1000s of small towns with small town histories, cultures, and identities. Len Colton and his […]

My friend Serge has bought a painting.

Art by Yasmina Reza

Boy by Anna Ziegler

An American Daughter by Wendy Wasserstein

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Art – 4/5 Stars From the author of the play God of Carnage, this play begins with a short monologue from one of the three characters explaining how his friend has just bought a new piece of art of 220,000 euros. This painting is solid white, with a white background, but with the smallest indication of three diagonal stripes across the middle and maybe something at the bottom. The friend who bought it is a dentist of modest means and this piece represents a giant part […]

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

Inifinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

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If I go searching for “White Whale” books online I mostly find lists of books about whales, which is disappointing. For me, this is one of the White Whales of White Whales for a lot of people. For one, it’s popular to talk about reading this book, and it’s equally popular to talk about avowedly NOT reading this book. I learned about this book for the first time in college when I was discovering such books. At the same time I also became seriously interested […]

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

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I might be alone here, or I might be the victim of a weird physical ailment (I’ll explain in a bit), but I don’t think I liked this one very much. This is Raymond Chandler’s next to last novel, and it’s somewhere around 100 pages longer than any of his previous works. It’s famous among other things for giving the world a solid recipe for a gimlet (2 oz of gin, 2 oz of Rose’s Lime juice, sometimes bitters). It’s also the basis for a […]

I found this manuscript in 1982 in that forgotten ‘archive’ attached to the governor’s office in Gebze that I used to rummage through for a week each summer…

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

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This is the first novel by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who I learned about with many other people when he won the Nobel Prize about 15 years ago. This is the third book of his I’ve read now along with My Name is Red, which is quite similar or shares similarities with this book, and Snow, a contemporary novel not all that much like these too. In this novel, we meet a young Italian scholar in the early Renaissance who is captured by slavers, and because of […]



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