Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham

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I had a dumb moment reading this book where I thought…hmmm, this reminds me of Bahktin’s concept of the carnivalesque. Which is pretty much the same as reading The Trial and thinking Hmmm, how Kafkaesque. The joke here is that this book begins us literally in describing a carnival. The opening of the novel really is this way. It’s like the opening of Carousel, where we’re getting a lot of information, told through multiple forms and voices, bringing us into the story slowly by really […]

Ten Days that Shook the World

Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed

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When you combine reading this book with some additional books that continue to spell out the ultimate consequences of the Russian Revolution, even by just a few years, you can quickly see that even pure belief and action couldn’t fully protect you from the dangers of revolution. Yuri Slezkine’s House of Government spends a lot of time dealing with the post-revolution purges of the 1930s, which should at least complicate one’s sense of revolution. This book though adds another important factor: how people got so […]

The House of Government

The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine

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I have to admit that ultimately I know almost nothing about Russia, Russians, and the Russian Revolution. As much as I’ve read of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Checkov and Babel, and other novelists and dramatists, I can never quite understand much about the Russian character (as told in fiction), Russian history (outside of events and facts), and the Soviet Union. There’s a lot of reasons for this. For one, it’s taken me 40 years to really begin to process much about the US and its effects […]

The Wilder Shores of Love

The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanch

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This book is several decades old now, so it has some real baggage to it. There’s the racial and cultural baggage of being an orientialist book about orientalists orientaliziing the orient. For one. Also, especially in the first section, there’s a heavy emphasis in old school notions of love and marriage and well plenty of it feels from a certain time and place. The book itself though is an incredibly interesting personal history of four otherwise not well known women who tore off for the […]

The Big Book of Ghost Stories

The Big Book of Ghost Stories by Otto Penzler editor

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Another of the Otto Penzler books of collected stories, this book takes on the ghost story in fiction of the last 150 or so years. So, for example, we’re not getting Hamlet or The Castle of Otranto or anything like that. The collection still mostly focuses on stories written for magazine publication primarily, and this means tha a lot of stories were originally published in various pulp magazines in the 1930s or thereabouts, but different from the more noir collections, we end up with a […]

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag; Waldo; Magic Inc.

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert a Heinlein

Waldo by Robert A Heinlein

Magic Inc by Robert A Heinlein

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These three novellas by Robert A Heinlein were all first published, I think, in the early 1940s. But Heinlein’s early work were often repackaged and republished later once he was a better-selling writer. His early novellas sometimes went through fix-ups (melding two or more together to make a kind of novel out of them), but these have not gone through that. While Waldo and Magic Inc are published together, they are not connected in anyway beyond thematic considerations. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag Jonathan […]



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