Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

A Study in A Study of Scarlet

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Like another reviewer, I got that Stephen Fry collection of Sherlock Holmes. I have read a few of the novels fairly recently, so I will skipping those, but I hadn’t read A Study in Scarlet before. I will tell you straight off I have a hard time being unbiased about Sherlock Holmes so I will likely give all them a pretty high review score, and well, I think we’ll all be ok on the other side of it. I suppose there’s not a lot of new […]

“It’s just make-believe for rich people”

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I enjoyed this novel just fine, but I will be thinking about it for awhile. For one, it’s just so effing clever in its construction and its story. In a way, it does the opposite of what I was annoyed by in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, where he makes explicit reference to an author he’s parodying. This is a Henry James novel if homosexuality were not criminalized in England in the 19th/20th century. I know this because our main character is a graduate student […]

Another Student Recommendation

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Again, when a students tells you a book is their favorite and is super excited by it, you have to read it. Ricardo told me about this one and how much he loved it. So when I found a copy, I gave it to him after reading it. Oddly, for all the reading I did as a kid, I never read this. I know it’s like the most famous YA ever and all that, but somehow it passed me by. So to start off the […]

Final Countdown

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Final set of Novellas from the Collection, and a final word:   On the High Marsh 3/5 Stars So this story is another Earthsea story. Purportedly taking place on a relatively untouched island from the Earthsea archipelago, this is a variation on a common trope: the mysterious stranger come to town. I guess if I read more Earthsea novels and stories, I might be better equipped to place this one within the continuum of stories, but I can’t, so I can’t really weigh in on […]

Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam

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This novel is about multiple families intersecting around culture, marriage, death, life, abortion, Asia Minor, Djinn’s, and not so oblique literary references. This starts with an aborted abortion. Taking place in multiple settings, namely California and Istanbul, this novel deals with a family of Turks and a family of Armenians being unwittingly and unwantingly shoved together. There’s some second marriages, sex, life, coffee, talks about the world. And so forth. Overall the writing itself I liked just fine and found a lot of the novel […]

I [don’t] wanna live with a Vinegar Girl

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This book is from the same series of books as Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, which I thought was great all around. That book took on the source material and transformed it, and while it did have some over-clever nods to the material, the narrator was aware of the material so it wasn’t schlocky the ways that sometimes these pastiche novels can be. This novel was, sadly. This is a re-doing of The Taming of the Shrew, which is weird to adapt, since 10 Things I hate about You was […]



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