Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

It was 3:35, Tuesday afternoon, in the State Penitentiary, and the inmates were returning from the workshops.

The Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith

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This is another Patricia Highsmith novel, this one from 1961. Reading about it, it seems like she’s writing a kind of psychological novel about prison life in the United States. We meet Philip Carter, a young engineer in prison for embezzlement and fraud (charges we understand are false — as he was a fall guy for a conman who died recently). He’s been in prison for a few weeks and in an attempt to appease his cell mate he delivers some contraband cigarettes when he’s […]

Walking up Fifth Avenue at night, Spofforth begins to whistle.

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

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This is the novel that got me on my recent kick for Walter Tevis in the first place. I was looking up books that won or were nominated for the big sci fi awards, and this was was nominated for one of them. Then I saw that he had written The Hustler, so that opened up more, and then Hoopla had several of his books available, so here I am. This is a science fiction book more or less, but is more so written as a […]

“How old are you?”

Ben in the World by Doris Lessing

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The answer is 18. Ben is 18. This is a sequel I didn’t like to a book I didn’t like. Oddly, and I have ended up reading a lot of Doris Lessing in the interim, the first book in this series The Fifth Child is the first book I ever read from Doris Lessing. I read it shortly after she won the Nobel Prize, and I was kind of annoyed because I just didn’t think it was very good. It’s about a fifth child of a […]

Alva Perry was a dignified and reserved woman of Scotch and Spanish descent, in her early forties.

Plain Pleasures by Jane Bowles

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This is a kind of split review of both the short story collection Plain Pleasures by the American writer Jane Bowles and other for the various extra material published in her collected works as notebooks and unpublished pieces. The opening story of this collection which is the title story starts with a very odd and curious scene in which a woman invites her neighbor over to eat roasted potatoes that she cooks in an impromptu fire in her backyard. I don’t think this predates barbeque grills, […]

Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard.

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

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This is by far my front runner for the best book I will read all year. It’s absolutely fantastic through and through. The premise is pretty simply: Beth Harmon is orphaned when she’s seven, but her life was already one filled with banal forms of trauma like the addiction and break up of her parents, abandonment, and so on. When she’s sent to an orphanage she quickly and easily excels in her schoolwork, but her brain is full of emotional and psychical storms, and so […]

And here we are once again with tonight’s top stories.

Mother Hubbard by Ishmael Reed

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This collection of Ishmael Reed plays includes plays from about 1970 through 2009. Many of the plays have been updated at various times, or else it would seem weird that a play from 1970 is referencing Bill Gates, 1996, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. I decided to read this book in part because of the fact that I’ve read several Ishmael Reed novels and nonfiction books at various times and his audaciousness and brazenness, but also complete clarity of thought and refusal to compromise ideas […]



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