Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

My home town was just a village of six hundred or so…

If It Bleeds by Stephen King

Rat by Stephen King

Mr Harrigan's Phone by Stephen King

The Life of Chuck by Stephen King

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Somehow I didn’t even know this was going to be a novellas collection, and I think after reading The Institute last week after waiting a few months to get to it, I am glad for this kind of book instead of another long novel. Mostly this is a solid collection that I don’t think actually works great for new readers. I think they should read his previous novel first. This collection will work for everyone on the Stephen King bi-annual plan, and that’s not a bad […]

Sam lay on his back, his eyes closed, right at the edge of the broad, low bed.

The Book of Happiness by Nina Berberova

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A small novel written in the 1930s (I think — it’s hard to locate) by a Russian expat living in Paris, and not published until much later and translated into English in the 1990s. It’s a small, sad novel about a woman in her 20s finding her best friend from childhood dead by suicide after she’s reconnected with him after a decade or more apart. The novel is written as a kind of reflective of their life as children and adolescents, less about the space […]

By dawn at least half the members of the Kelly Gang were badly wounded and it was then the creature appeared from behind police lines.

The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

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I am no expert on anything Australia, but I’ve read enough Peter Carey novels to talk about some of the things he’s concerned with in his fiction. Modes of storytelling is a big one, and of course, official versus unofficial discourse in that story telling. The first book of his I read was Jack Maggs which is a retelling of Great Expectations where we see Magwitch recast as an early Australian, and talking back to the ways in which he’s treated in the novel. This novel is […]

Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour.

Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

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This book is dumb as hell. This book is offensive as hell. That’s where I start with this one. I watched the movie a number of times as a kid and what I learned from reading the book is that the movie complicates the ways in which the story discusses the Troubles in a way that the book is fundamentally unable to do. Tom Clancy is an unreflective American imperialist and Jack Ryan as weird American daddy issues and think morality is not committing murder […]

When it all began, Paulo Aranha would have been bored.

The Andromeda Evolution by Daniel H Wilson

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

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The Andromeda Evolution – 2/5 Stars I read the Andromeda Strain for the first time last year and it’s mostly a very good and scary book about the dangers of human technology, human arrogance, and weirdly manliness! For a slim book about a disease potentially wiping humanity, there’s a lot of talk about men being men and having sex with women. Anyway, while this book is perfectly well-written and an almost hilarious parody of Michael Crichton’s stilted writing, this is a completely defanged thriller. It’s […]

I first met Pauline Delos at one of those substantial parties Earl Janoth like to give every two or three months…

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

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The opening of this noir book is so wrapped up in 1940s publishing jargon that I thought I was reading a weird science fiction book at first. We begin in a giant highrise where our first (of several) narrators in hiding in the clock tower of the building. He’s witnessed a murder (the owner of the publishing firm did it) and he’s hiding. The rest of the book takes place along several lines of narration as the publisher tries to figure out who saw it, […]



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