Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The first sunny day of spring evaporated the dampness that had accumulated in the soil through the winter months, and warmed the bones of the old people who now could stroll the gentle orthopedic paths of the garden.

Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende

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An early, but not first novel by Isabel Allende. This novel takes place smack in the middle of the Pinochet regime, and I had to look up some info (I am fairly well familiar with the regime and it’s basic history, but the dates of the novel were curious to me). Because she’s related to the deposed and murdered president Salvador Allende, you can imagine, especially if you read this novel, that there’d be no way she wouldn’t have been targeted and killed by Pinochet. […]

On a clear, blueblack, starry night, in the city of Berlin, in the year 2003, two young people sat down to dinner.

The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe

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This is the first of three (current, I guess) novels about the same set of characters…well educated, initially precocious, young people from Birmingham trying to figure out life in these 1970s England in the middle of the Wilson administration. The novel focuses primarily on Benjamin Trotter and his sister Lois, whose nephew is telling the story to a new acquaintance, and niece of a more ancillary character in the novel (the ending indicates that her story is forth coming in the second novel). Most of […]

I do not now have the slightest understanding of the events which got us out of one big white house which we rented into another, bigger white house which we own, at least in part.

Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson

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This is the follow up memoir by Shirley Jackson and published in 1957. It takes places a few years after the previous book Life Among the Savages  and adds I think a deeper analysis of domestic life, and more importantly a whole host of memorable children, dogs and cats to the mix. From the first book, you might already know the story “Charles” which Jackson published separately and in the The Lottery collection. From there, Laurie is now at the end of fifth grade, a little league […]

The land around Sydney and Alicia Bartleby’s two-story cottage was flat, like most of Suffolk country

A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith

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In which Patricia Highsmith writes a kind of Agatha Christie novel. But not one of the detective ones. In this novel we find hack American writer Sydney Bartleby in a loveless and acrimonious marriage to English (middling) heiress Alicia. As it goes, as his writing career becomes increasingly more anemic, his distaste and disdain for the woman closest to him, who sees him, and worse, sees his increasing and inarguable failure he grows more and more hateful of her. But shocker! He doesn’t kill her. […]

I recall reading, in The New York Review of Books, a couple of years ago, an article that jellyfish were taking over the planet.

Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish by Tom McCarthy

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This is a collection of essays by the novelist Tom McCarthy, not the filmmaker and actor Tom McCarthy. I have previously read his novels Remainder, which I absolutely loved, and Satin Island, which I was lukewarm about in general. This collection is a kind of odds and ends collection, not either a focused effort in terms of theme or time period. The timeframe of the whole collection is an oddly situated 15 years from about 2002 to 2016. That time period involved a lot of discussion of […]

What were you telling yourself when it happened?

Pursuit by Joyce Carol Oates

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This is probably one of the more effective Joyce Carol Oates books in the last few years in part because it’s very very low on conceit and premise and high on tone, style, and execution. We begin right in the middle of things as a young wife, newly married as in the previous day, steps out of a bus, off of the curb, and in front of the same bus. It’s unclear what was going through her mind, whether or not she was attempting to […]



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