Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Poem Unlimited

Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom

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Another one of Harold Bloom’s short guiding texts about one of Shakespeare’s plays. In these text (and I think this is the first of them, and the inspiration for the others) Bloom takes on the play either in order, thematically, or both and does both general and close-readings of them. At times the text is at the level of general musings and other times in depth, including with some additional reference at times. The title of the book comes this speech by Polonius: The best […]

Henry IV parts 1 and 2

Henry IV Part I by William Shakespeare

Henry IV Part II by William Shakespeare

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I know almost nothing about Shakespeare’s history plays, except that we were randomly assigned to read Richard III in tenth grade, and I am entirely grateful to that teacher (for that, and that alone — I never really liked her) for introducing us to the lesser known Shakespeares, even as famous as Richard III is ultimately. If you’re trying to keep your history straight, the earliest of the histories (of England plays) King John appears first, ruling around 1200 during the absence of King Richard. […]

Some Scalzi

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Travel by Bullet by John Scalzi

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The Android’s Dream – 3/5 This is an early Scalzi, and it’s one of his, sigh, funny books. Sometimes I really like John Scalzi and sometimes I think he’s so annoying. This book is a pretty funny science fiction in general but he still Scalzis all over it. We begin with a secretive meeting between someone who is mentioned as some kind of diplomat getting a piece of experimental technology grafted onto (into) his body. He says he is going to try to fart his […]

The River Between

The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

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This is one of the very early novels of the writer Ngũgĩ. He’s usually on the shortlist (unofficial) for the Nobel each year but keeps not winning. This seems likely because it’s possible he might reject the award (and maybe her should?) or use the platform to continue to spell out his anti-colonial politics (which he certainly should do). He’s completely fluent in English, like previous Nobel winner Wole Soyinka and like the unawarded but deserving Chinua Achebe. These three writers don’t all come from […]

Oh the horror! (Oh, the not horror)

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru

Enderby Outside by Anthony Burgess

Katie by Michael McDowell

The Night Boat by Robert R. McCammon

Children of the Night by Dan Simmons

Blue World by Robert R. McCammon

Blue World and Other Stories by Robert R. McCammon

Enderby's Dark Lady by Anthony Burgess

Bethany's Sin by Robert R. McCammon

A Clockwork Testament by Anthony Burgess

The Fight by Norman Mailer

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Red Pill – 3/5 This novel came out in 2019, but leads up to and ends at the 2016 US presidential race. There’s also plenty of energy connected to the Brexit vote too given that both Kunzru and his narrator are British. The novel begins with a writer being accepted into a fellowship program in Germany near the Wannsee building famous for the Wannsee Conference where Heydrich and Eichmann, among other Nazi officials, hammered out some of the details of the “Final Solution”. This, as […]

Smalls

The Werewolf Principle by Clifford Simak

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Miracles of St Cuthbert by Bede of Jarrow

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

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The Werewolf Principle – 3/5 Not actually about werewolves, or even one werewolf. We begin this novel with a senator and his daughter coming across a man who has apparently recently returned from a trip to space, for which he was gone for 200 years of Earth time. He has no memory beyond a few basics, nothing really to say, or anything to really explain his situation. Once we get going a little bit, we come to learn that it’s possible that there’s more than […]



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