Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

First mixed bag of the year!

Love Story by Erich Segal

In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner

Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

Masscult and Midcult by Dwight Macdonald

Running Dog by Don Delillo

Chronicle in Stone by Ismael Kadare

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowksi

Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

War in Val D'orcia by Iris Origo

Through Blood and Fire at Gettysburg by Joshua Chamberlain

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Love Story – 2/5 What do you say about a 50 year novel that feels dead on arrival? This is the novel that became the movie that is often referenced, and seldom watched. The novel is fine. It’s depressingly fine. Our narrator goes to Harvard, meets a girl, they get married, he goes to law school, she gets sick, and she dies. In the middle he loves her father, because he hates his father. His parents mildly but not so mildly disown him (lucky), and […]

On Bullshit and On Truth

On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

On Truth by Harry Frankfurt

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Never has a write written such a perfect set of books while also having the absolute perfect name to do so.   On Bullshit – 4 Stars This book would be the perfect book to read with a class of high school seniors as a transition to college. It fits the tone, the necessary, and the precision of language as they move on. It’s also perfect for kids not going to college, but that’s a separate issue. If only he didn’t swear so much! But […]

Forever Peace

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

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This is one of those books that won all the awards and seems roughly pretty beloved and maybe even achieved a status of instant classic, a weird state for a book published in my lifetime (and since I easily could have read it when I was old enough to read when it came out). I liked it or rather, I did think it was interesting and understood why others liked it. To me though it was missing a kind of….heft in the middle to give […]

Everything is Illuminated

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

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I read this book back when it first came out, and I’ve read a few more of Jonathan Safran Foer’s works. I am generally of mixed opinion for his novels. I think they tend to be a bit of a mess as a whole, with some very clever and up to powerful writing at times. This book sets that tone early on with the opening narration. In the 1970s and 80s, Philip Roth wrote a handful of novels that tried to make sense of American […]

Black Reconstruction in America

Black Reconstruction in America by WEB Du Bois

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Sometimes I think about the ways people talk about the US today. There’s a lot of ahistorical analysis happening or perhaps a failure to stop naval-gazing and look to the past to understand where we find ourselves. In part I mean of course our specific divided politics. I want to blame the internet for dividing us, but that’s not only too simple, I am not sure it’s correct. We’ve always been divided and it’s always been this way and people have always acted like little […]

The Black Jacobins

The Black Jacobins by CLR James

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You say you want a revolution? I’ve been reading a handful of books about various revolutions, and something that emerged in my thinking is how many of them are based in political and cultural revolution primarily, and how suspect I find them to often be. I also just read Karl Popper, and maybe he’s influencing my thinking there. Separate from that, I read a book like this one, which details the history of the San Domingo Revolution in Haiti in the 1790s and 1800s, where […]



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