Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

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This is a history of the English language written by Bill Bryson from 1990 and it FEEEEEEELS very 1990 in its tone and scope. For the most part it’s interesting and holds up in a lot of ways. The audiobook version is really nice, especially when it gets to some of the weird pronunciations of Welsh and English place names. So when the audiobook reader is quickly spelling out the placenames I am quickly trying to envision them so when he reads them I can […]

Now, what could I do with the boy? Joshua asked himself.

Making of the Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon

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I think I liked this novel a lot more than other readers, but I also feel like there’s a LITTLE TOO MUCH Vel Veeter in this novel for comfort. I have a thing about authors capturing kind of figure in text (white, middle-class-ish, grad student or close enough, wayward, somewhat outwardly and inwardly destructive). I’m not saying these are good people, but it also feels most interesting when someone is a kind of reformed version of this figure looking backward and writing about it. So […]

The drought had now lasted ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.

2001 by Arthur C Clarke

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The introduction to this novel written by (and in the audiobook, performed by) Arthur C Clarke is probably the best part of the whole thing. In it, Clarke explains the curious decision to write the novel concentrically with the screenplay and how the novel was a choice based on how little explanation (outside of the visual elements) the screenplay would be able to explain. The movie, if you’ve seen it, is an absolute masterpiece in visual (and audio) language telling so much of the story, […]

Some years ago I published a monograph entitled This Year You Write Your Novel.

Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley

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I picked up this book from the new books shelf at the library while I was waiting for my oil to get changed. It’s a weirdly harmless book that annoyed in a few particular ways. I generally like Walter Mosley novels, but he’s got that thing that almost every prolific novelist has, the inability to not write a book that he’s thinking about writing. That’s why he’s published so many books in his career, and for every very good one, there’s some really really bad […]

Context is everything.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

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This is one of those kind of white whale novels of mine for a long time. I’ve only read one other Jonathan Lethem novel, and I was thoroughly disappointed in it, especially given how much I thought I would like it. That novel was Fortress of Solitude and while I’m not the world’s biggest comics fan, I did grow up with all kinds of nerdy things as a big part of my life (I generally seem pretty straight-laced/normcore presenting, but then there’s some deep nerdiness in […]

I arrive at St Gatien from Nice on Tuesday, the 14th of August.

Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler

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A spy novel from the early 195os, but taking place in the 1930s in the lead up to WWII. We follow an almost entirely stateless man–a Hungarian-born man with Yugoslavia passport that came to him through a brokered treaty in the wake of WWI and who finds himself in some trouble in France when his camera is confiscated by the police containing photos of armaments on the coastline of Nice. Because he is charged with espionage and because of his fragile existence in the country, […]



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