Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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I have a general theory that a poet should always write at least one novel, and novelist should mostly avoid writing poetry. Some novelists I like have written some serviceable poetry like John Updike or Margaret Atwood or Marge Piercy. Some novelists have written excellent poetry like DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, but that’s much more rare. But man, the poets who have written good to great novels is all over the place. This is just simply one of the premier examples. This is the […]

Miller’s Tale

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

The Price by Arthur Miller

The Man Who had all the Luck by Arthur Miller

Incident at Vichy by Arthur Miller

After the Fall by Arthur Miller

The Ride Down St Morgan by Arthur Miller

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

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All My Sons In this play, we find ourselves looking in on two families torn apart by the war in a specific way. Joe Keller runs a machine factory that was refitted to build airplane parts during the war. The factory came under fire when a shipment of faulty parts that led to at least 29 deaths of airmen. Consequent of that Joe Keller was tried but exonerated when a second in command took the fall. The general belief is that Joe was innocent and […]

Tower of Swallows

Tower of Swallows by Andrzej Sapkowski

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In the audiobook of the Witcher books, the narrator pronounces “Dandelion” not like the flower, but as “Dan Dell Eon”. It’s weird and off-putting. It made me wonder two things for the first time in the series. One, is that really how British people say that, and I think the answer is: no. Two, why is that his name? It turns out that the character’s Polish name is Jaskier, which is also what he’s called in the show. This means Buttercup. I wondered after this […]

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martell

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This is a collection of early stories from Yann Martell, most famous for Life of Pi. If you look at his general output of writing, across thirty years, he hasn’t published all that much, but of course Life of Pi is a) a huge success, b) won the Booker Prize and became an Oscar winning movie, and c) is quite good. It also begins with Yann Martell the narrator of the book discussing his frustration with publishing and finding things to write about. This book […]

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

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It’s the book that pretty much everyone has some familiarity with, and perhaps like a lot of people, I have not read this one before. If you can imagine the huge circular diagram of the hero’s journey, not the simplified version, but the more detailed one with more archaic language, this is the book that illustrates that idea. The book itself is structured like a kind of macro ethnography. What this means to me is rather than telling a community’s story through a discussion of […]

The Bobby Gold Stories

The Bobby Gold Stories by Anthony Bourdain

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A collection of short stories or perhaps a novel in story form about a restaurant bouncer/mob enforcer. I haven’t read anything by Anthony Bourdain before and certainly not his fiction. I was surprised when someone not primarily known for fiction writing, writes fiction, and it feels like fiction that comes together in a way that is enjoyable. Maybe my standards are too low for that kind of thing, but given how easily something like this could become a vanity project/ego trip. The stories themselves circulate […]



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