Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin

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Leo Proudhammer is a lot of things at the beginning of this novel. He’s 39, he’s a famous stage actor, he’s world-traveled, he’s a Black man who grew up in Harlem, and he’s bisexual. He’s also just had a stress induced heart-attack that’s nearly killed him. In his post-attack state, he begins to reflect on his life to this point. He begins by telling about his childhood, where he and his seven-years-older brother looked out for each from their tyrant of a father. There’s the […]

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen L Carter

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This novel sort of answers the question of what if Dan Brown wrote a John Grisham novel. And well, the answer to that question is probably not that interesting ultimately, but this novel is a solid legal thriller with some suspense and historical fiction elements wrapped in it. The novel begins with the premise that Lincoln survives his assassination attempt while Johnson dies. That’s the opposite of how it went (actually Johnson was never even attacked but his assassination was plotted). It’s a few years […]

Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand

Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany

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It’s difficult to review this novel, and would be difficult to recommend it because the experience of reading it can be confusing and disorienting. Two other books kind of come to mind for me with this book, one that seemingly borrows some of the technique in this book and the other that clarifies the experience. There’s also a few other sci fi books and movies that create the same kind of disorientation for me. We begin with a scene in which a young wastrel (who […]

Half Blood Blues

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

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Whenever I read James Baldwin, especially his essays, I think about how when he talks about Paris in the 40s and 50s (and so forth) as being a place in which he doesn’t always have to be conscious of his race as a Black man (and especially an African-American). There’s a part of me that gets it, but I also think about what forms of racism, prejudice, or just otherness he still must go through, and understand more so that he’s making a careful calculation […]

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser

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I am not entirely sure what I mean by this but this is one of the most 1990s novels I could imagine. Other examples from American writers: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, and basically any TS Boyle novels. This novel begins in the later 1800s and makes its way through the early 1900s and spends its whole length in New York City. Martin Dressler is a cigar-maker’s son, and when he’s […]

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

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Maybe living under an oppressive authoritarian regime provides some clarity. Maybe it doesn’t, but one of the things I find fascinating about overt (and especially real world) novel that take place within these kinds of regimes is that I can never truly understand how life happens there. I don’t mean the parts that happen in reaction to the regime itself. So reading a dystopian novel like 1984 or Hunger Games isn’t what I mean. Or even a real-world text like Darkness at Noon is still […]



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