Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Margery Allingham (1); Barbara Tuchman (1); Barry Goldwater (1); Katherine Dunn (1); William Wells Brown (1); Elaine Marie Alphin (1); Julian Barnes (1)

The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham

Notes from China by Barbara Tuchman

Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

On Cussing by Katherine Dunn

Narrative of William W Brown, A Fugitive Slave by William W Brown

An Unspeakable Crime by Elaine Marie Alphin

The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes

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The Case of the Late Pig “The main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is to not let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story.” This middle of the road mystery by Margery Allingham (I mean middle of the road in the sense that she is eight books into the series with this particular detective and about 10 books into her career) from 1937 begins with our narrator, the detective (erm criminologist) Albert Campion. He is called out into the […]

Annie Ernaux (1)

Cleaned Out by Annie Ernaux

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It would be easy to assume or guess that this Annie Ernaux novel about a young woman needing to seek out, as she calls out, “a back alley abortion” is already covered in the auto-fiction book “A Happening”, and in some ways it is. This is Annie Ernaux’s debut novel from the early 1970s, and while both probably have some place in truth (certainly “A Happening” does), this book is so much more a novel. They also cover much different ground. The story in “A […]

Aldo Leopold (1)

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

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“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.” The wild things in this opening line mean the creature, plants, spaces, and feature of the wild or wilderness, and not the more kinetic definition of it. Aldo Leopold was an early environmentalist, if we’re using the 20th century determination of the word, as opposed to a more general term like naturalist. He believed in the conservation, stewardship, and those other more classic understandings. This book is a small set of essays […]

Alain de Botton (1)

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

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“There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness.” I like a book like this sometimes, as it replaces or mimics (even fleetingly) the feeling of reading a long and difficult book. It’s not a reading guide, but more of a mini-biography and dissemination of some of the ideas and events from Marcel Proust’s life and work. I have read the first three volumes in In Search of Lost Time, so while I haven’t read all of it, I am close to the […]

Cho Nam-joo (1)

Kim JiYoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo

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“Kim JiYoung is thirty-three years old, or thirty-four in Korean age.” One review for this book says it’s not really a novel, but a documentary of a kind of life in contemporary Korea. It’s not correct because it’s a novel about woman’s life, and just because there’s parallels to be found with lots of other people in similar experiences, well, I am not sure what else you might call it but a novel. Kim JiYoung is born in 1982 and one of the first things […]

Yu Miri (1)

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

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” I used to think that life was like a book: you turn to the first page, and then there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one.” The narrator of this short novel was born in 1933, he tells us, the same year as the emperor. Like the emperor he also has a son. Unlike the emperor, born in luxury (even at a trying and turbulent time) our narrator experiences fallout and extreme poverty, in […]



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