Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Evelyn Waugh

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

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“‘Sent down for indecent behaviour, eh?’ said Paul Pennyfeather’s guardian.” This is Evelyn Waugh’s first real novel, and is a revision of an earlier novel he was working on. It was published in 1928, and if you’ve only read something like Brideshead Revisited or to some extend Men at Arms (or the whole of the Sword of Honour trilogy) it’s easy to mistake the humor and irony of those more serious novels for the primary tone of much of Waugh’s fiction. Several of his books […]

Samanta Schweblin

Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin

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“‘We’re lost’, says my mother.” This a a recent collection of Samanta Schweblin stories, and like all Samanta Schweblin books I’ve read, I was left at the end of this one not really being entirely sure what I just read, or if I liked it. So it goes. The stories here, as the title suggests, are about displacement, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes metaphysical. The stories are anchored by a long central novella and like a lot of collections that is the most realized and […]

Philip K Dick

Collected Stories Volume 3 by Philip K Dick

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“Professor Anthony Douglas lowered gratefully into his red-leather easy chair and sighed. A long sigh, accompanied by a labored removal of his shoes and numerous grunts as he kicked them into the corner. He folded his hands across his ample middle and lay back, eyes, closed. ‘Tired?’ Laura Douglas, asked turning from the kitchen stove a moment, her dark eyes sympathetic.” In this third volume of Philip K Dick stories, we get a similarly varied collection of space, future, technology, magic, dimensional, and other kinds […]

Gordon Wood

The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787 by Gordon S Wood

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“The American Revolution has always seemed to be an extraordinary kind of revolution, and no more so than to the Revolutionaries themselves.” This long history of the formation of the American Republic begins with an introduction by Gordon Wood about 30 years after its initial publication. This new introduction suggests a shift in thinking both in himself and the general consensus about the role of “republicanism” in the formation of the new republic. This focus helps to frame a little more of the reading here […]

Susan Wise Bauer

History of the Renaissance World by Susan Wise Bauer

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“The First Crusade had just ended–and with it, an age.” This third history from Susan Wise Bauer takes us from the late middle ages to the conquest of Constantinople. Bauer tells us early on that this is not a history of the Renaissance, but simply uses the Renaissance as the time signature that the history comprises. There’s plenty to say about using a primarily European event (especially one that ushers in the height of European Imperialism) as the marker for a world history, but in […]

JG Ballard

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

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“Wars came early to Shaghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.” This a roman a clef more or less by J.G. Ballard, or even something close to a kind of autofiction or memoir/novel based on his experiences as an adolescent living in Shanghai, the son of British colonial figures, at the start of World War II, and eventually his time in […]



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