Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Two years into a twenty-three year prison-sentence, on a day pushing 100 degrees, Ronnie Jones had his first visitor.

Dopesick by Beth Macy

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I already reviewed a follow up Audible Original by Beth Macy where she investigates the background to the murder and the murder of one of featured subjects of this book, a drug-addicted single mother from a well off family in Roanoke, VA who was found murdered in Las Vegas after leaving a drug treatment center in the Nevada city. What I didn’t realize then was that the primary sources of that podcast were its focus, hearing the interviews with the woman, Tess, and her family. […]

One day in my young youth at high summer, lolling with my lovely companions upon a haystack, I found a needle.

The Stories of Muriel Spark by Muriel Spark

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The collected stories of the Scottish writer Muriel Spark, most well known for her slim novels like The Driver’s Seat, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Mandelbaum Gate, and The Girls of Slender Means. I have to admit, there hasn’t been a single Muriel Spark novel that I’ve absolutely loved. For whatever reason, her use of language feels refracted to me in the sense that I look at it and see it and read, but my brain can’t a hundred percent process what exactly is going on. […]

I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

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I hate when I ask myself the question “Who does this remind me of?” and my brain goes right to another person who shares various demographic features with the current writer? Oh, so you’re saying EVERY writer from Japan reminds you of Murakami? Why’s that! No reason I swear! But hear I am fine with it. This is like a Magda Szabo novel that takes place is a Milan Kundera world. It’s a strange and bizarre world in a Polish town on the Czechia border […]

I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning.

Writers and Lovers by Lily King

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I kept wanting to like this book, but it kept whiffing on things that felt egregious. And by the end I’d soured on it. Like her previous novel, I read this one straight through, and maybe that was part of it, but these moments kept sticking out to me, beyond the somewhat derivative story. We are following Casey (Camilla) during her 31st year. She’s an aspiring novelist with a writing degree, on year six of her novel. She’s fresh from a writer’s retreat, her mother […]

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of the Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

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The OG Twilight. Seriously, I had to go back and check ten years of internet ago to see if people were talking about this, and they were. The basic plot and set up for this whole world, though not being vampires, is Twilight. So Stephanie Meyer might owe Natalie Babbitt some money. I think I might have read this one as a kid, but it also might just be in the aether of my childhood the way a lot of books are.  It’s about a […]

Mrs. Van Rydock moved a little back from the mirror and sighed.

They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie

The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

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They Do It With Mirrors A 1952 Miss Marple novel which takes Miss Marple out of her comfort zone away from the village of Saint Mary-Mead and into a reformatory for boys. She’s turned onto this mystery by an old friend who has asked her to check in on the reformatory after her sister and brother in law has sort of given themselves over to the place. When Miss Marple shows up, she finds a young man (20s) there to meet her. He helps her […]



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