Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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This is one of those novels that is in my head as just perfect or near-perfect in execution. That list also includes The Great Gatsby and The Metamorphosis and Heart of Darkness. It may or may have much to say about enjoyment or heights of reading or anything like that but about precision of form and content, and especially economy of language. I define literature in fiction as telling a story in the only possible way. So in this book, and this is a reread for the first […]

“Well,” the bookstore manager said, “it’s Valentine’s Day.”

Life Sentences by Laura Lippmann

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In the intro to one of the Tess Monaghan books Laura Lippmann talks about 2009 bringing to the world this book, which was getting some of her best journalism reviews, which very well might be true, but boy do readers seem to really hate this one. I think it’s ok, and not my favorite of her books, and not remotely my favorite of her non-Tess books either. In this book a best-selling memoirist, whose first book told the story of when her white father went […]

Our story begins in a run-down bar in Key West, not so many years from now.

The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman

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This book is kind of bad in a way that frustrates me and reminds me a lot of what I think is probably the worst (not exactly the worst but the worst of the best) Connie Willis story where HL Mencken’s ghost shows up to comment on the world. We begin in a bar where an academic is approached by another man and they determine they have a mutual love for Hemingway and they concoct a scheme to pass off forgeries and scam writings as […]

Toward the end of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o’clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full steam.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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So the first part of this book, the setup, the premise, and some of the early action is basically the same as Elf. Myshkin, a minor and ultimately broke Prince in Russia, is released from a sanitarium (for mental health) and has been isolated from the world to such a degree that when he shows up into the world of the Russian aristocracy he’s either fresh-faced and innocent, or naive to otherwise more cutthroat world of that milieu. In a lot of ways, it’s either an […]

It’s freezing–an extraordinary 0 degrees Fahrenheit–and it’s snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik

Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg

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I found this book from 1993 by the Danish writer Peter Hoeg to be pretty rough going. It started off really engaging and that carried on for about 100 pages, and then after about 150 more I was slogging through the novel, and ended up speed skimming through the rest. The novel is narrated by Smilla, a Greenland Inuit with a Danish father living in Copenhagen. She returns home one evening to learn that a neighbor boy, a fellow Inuit whom she has befriended, has […]

The Subinfo Computers owned by Lies, Incorporated had been caught in an unnatural act by a service mechanic.

Lies Inc by Philip K Dick

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This one was pretty rough going and it took me a bit of time to figure out why it was. Some chunk of my listening was spent going, wait, why don’t I like this very much. I was compelling to complete it by my completionist tendencies (a theme today, by the way) because it had been sitting in my Audible library for like six years after I bought it for $2 years ago. So the novel is about a future in which corporations control space […]



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