Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Evil and the Mask

The Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura

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The protagonist of this novel grows up in a kind of cult (formed by his father) where he is told at some point that he was born to be a cancer on the world. This is not clearly spelled out for a very long time what exactly this means. But it’s a terrible and abusive cult and system nonetheless. Along with an adopted sister, he plots to and eventually kills his father and escapes. He grows up, changes his face through plastic surgery, and tries […]

The Unvanquished

The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

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If someone is ever interesting in getting into Faulkner, you could very well start with this book. I still think the best book to start with is actually As I Lay Dying because it primes you for Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, but this is a good introduction into the ideas and themes that carry throughout most of his work. It’s also, I think, the only book where he tackles the war head-on and specifically the war and the aftermath during Reconstruction. […]

Frenchman’s Creek

Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier

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I don’t know how OG this novel is, but it’s a sexy pirate adventure romp from the 1940s by our beloved Daphne du Maurier. You’ll be surprised to find that this book takes in Cornwall….and well, we find Lady Dona, part of the court in London getting so bored that she once dressed like a man to tool around the city and commit crimes. So she returns to her country estate to find a curious state of affairs. Her house is filthy and the new […]

The House of Morgan

The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow

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I cannot explain how impossibly weird it is to mention that my interest in this book comes explicitly from Real Housewives of New York. Sonja Morgan married one of the Morgan heirs when he was already fairly old and she was still fairly young. At the beginning of the show, she’s a few years divorced, but is still the beneficiary of that connection. She’s also clearly very damaged from the divorce, or least fragile. The story more or less goes that when her husband was […]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

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I guess if you’re going to read a “young man begins to question the institutions that have built up his understanding of the world” you could go with one of the best. Although the sub-genre obviously predates this book by quite a wide margin with The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe being more of the OG version — well aside from Hamlet, and The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil being a contemporary of Joyce’s. The difference here is the way in which […]

By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Postern of Fate and Seven Dials Mystery

By the Pricking of my Thumbs by Agatha Christie

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

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By the Pricking of My Thumbs – One of the last of Agatha Christie’s novels, and specifically the second to last of the five Tommy and Tuppence novels. It had been about 20 years since we got N or M? the WWII spy novel, and about twenty or more years in Tommy and Tuppence’s lives as well. We find them in their sixties, too old to even be looking back to youth, so much as at their middle age, when they were asked to help […]



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