Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The thing was: One million years ago, back in 1986 A.D., Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy of Ecuador.

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

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I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I was one of those teenage boys who read the crap out of Kurt Vonnegut (along with Stephen King, William Sleator, and a few others). This one is one my brother owned, and I recall trying to read it at some point and it just not taking. I’ve read it now, and from Vonnegut’s weird (but still good) 80s output, I think this one really stands out for its richness and inventiveness. We are told in the first […]

When I came to Sunbury, toward the end of May, one of the first people I met up with was Cousin Tune.

Farewell, Summer by Helen Hoover Santmyer

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I already only thought this little novel was ok headed into the last few short chapters. But then something frustrating happened to me as I read it. It became increasing clear that this novel was a rehash (even if unwittingly) of a novel I love and think is supremely good: LP Hartley’s The Go-Between. So maybe this one didn’t actually need to be pulled out of Santmyer’s leftover documents and papers, because not only is the story in this novel almost exactly the same as that […]

About half-past eight on a July evening, Humphrey Leigh was walking along the side of the Square.

A Coat of Varnish by CP Snow

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This is the final novel by the well-known British writer CP Snow. In the early days of the Booker Prize, when there was a clear tension between the older world of British writers in the 20th century (like Graham Greene and John Fowles, Paul Scott, and CP Snow) and newer writers (like JG Farrell, Beryl Bainbridge and the like) CP Snow ended up getting a few nods. The bulk of his writing was done previous to the 1970s and especially in the eleven novels of […]

Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Arthur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

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This is a middle career book for Saul Bellow and the book before the book that probably propelled him into the conversation for the Nobel. They’re not exactly awarded for individual books, but certainly those internationally acclaimed books do have a lot of influence. I was sort of avoiding this one because I found it on a list of “The Most Conservative Books of All Time” a list by Conservative commentaters, and I didn’t really feel like dealing with that. It’s not Conservative, and while […]

Whenever Yefim Semyonovich Rakhlin was asked what his next book would be about, he lowered his eyes, smiled, and replied, “I always write about decent people.”

The Fur Hat by Vladimir Voinovich

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Ludmila Ulitskaya wrote a great novel a few years back about what it was like being in the Soviet Union and living under the various cultural restrictions, and then how literary heroes like Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak wrote about and contributed to the resistance through cultural output. Even in the cases where their work was kind of co-opted as resistance even if they themselves were not exactly radicals there’s still something affirming about it. Vladimir Voinovich has a different story to tell. What […]

My mother called me Silver.

Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson

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I remember when this book came out in 2004. I was in grad school and I had JUST read a bunch of Jeanette Winterson books because of a crush I had on a fellow student, and well, you honestly couldn’t pick a much better writer to share a crush over. I didn’t read this one at the time, and that’s probably for the best as it’s less forceful and passionate than her first few novels (and certainly less crushworthy). It’s still an interesting exploration of […]



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