Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Susan Wise Bauer (1)

The History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer

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“On the morning of October 29, 312, the Roman soldier Constantine walked through the gates of Rome at the front of his army.” This is the second of the history books by Susan Wise Bauer that I’ve read now. Her approach is expansive, trying to cover huge sections of time and huge sections of geography in relatively short chapters. This obviously has limits, but the goal seems to be offering up a working sense of what was happening in the world in the given years, […]

Procopius (1)

The Secret History by Procopius

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I like a good secret history. I learned about this book from various book lists and of course from Donna Tartt swiping the title. But I got my first real sense of it from the work of Susan Wise Bauer, specifically “The History of the Medieval World” which borrows heavily from this historian (both from his official accounts and this more unofficial account). More than anything this is a book about the story of the book, meaning that the way and context of its writing […]

Brandon Sanderson (1); Mary Robinette Kowal (1)

The Original by Brandon Sanderson; Mary Robinette Kowal

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A novella co-written by Sanderson and Kowal, and with every co-written book like this, especially when I know both authors’ work to a certain degree, I spend a lot of time thinking about who must have written what. It’s not like a lot of Brandon Sanderson works, but it’s not quite what I know from Kowal. The novella is called “The Original” because we find ourselves in a future in which people can opt-in or out of certain technologies, including a cloning technology. Our narrator […]

Heather Ann Thompson (1)

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson

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This is a recent history of the Attica Prison uprising, some of its root causes, and decades-worth of aftermath. I wasn’t alive for Attica, and so it was mostly a cultural meme in my lifetime, but specifically its use in the Sydney Lumet movie “Dog Day Afternoon” with Al Pacino calling out “Attica! Attica!” as a (fake) rallying cry. That’s the way I’ve generally understood it. The uprising itself stemmed out a handful of predictable causes. Inmates had been agitating for a while from several […]

Chinelo Okparanta (2)

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

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“Midway between the Old Oda-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto.” This is the first novel by Chinelo Okparanta, who had already released a story collection a few years earlier, and more recently the novel Harry Sylvester Bird, which I read the other week and really enjoyed. This novel is also enjoyable but very different from that. […]

Natalie Haynes (1)

Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes

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“When Harry Hamlin stood behind the pillar in the darkness of Medusa’s lair in the Ray Harryhausen film Clash of the Titans, flames flickering off his shield, his face glistening with sweat, my brother and I were transfixed.” So begins Natalie Haynes’s book Pandora’s Jar, which is not a retelling of myths like other of her novels or even much to say about Perseus even. Instead, the book is a reinvestigation (which often feels like a good, fun undergraduate lecture) of the ways in which various […]



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