Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Public Opinion – Walter Lippmann (1922)

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann

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I kept finding myself thinking that this book is about the most direct precursor to the career of Neil Postman and other political commentators (Postman being political, but mostly writing about media and technology and education) that I could otherwise imagine. There’s a part of me that didn’t really know what I was heading into with this book and had kind of managed to expect a kind of HL Mencken type book, and maybe that’s because I was layering Walter Lippmann with Walter Winchell, and […]

The Black Lizard Book of Pulps – Otto Penzler (2007)

The Black Lizard Book of Pulps by Otto Penzler

The Third Murderer by Carroll John Daly

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Yeah this book is super long. I went to Otto Penzler’s bookstore in NY this summer. I didn’t see him there, but they mentioned him around the place a little. He’s very much into this material and his passion shows through in all the section breaks and introductions. The shorter introductions written by the other writers are very distinct. Laura Lippman and Harlan Coben both take the assignment in straightforward ways and introduce their sections — Dames and Crimefighters — in earnest. Harlan Ellison takes […]

Mixed Grill

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Who will Pay Reparations on my Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Necronomicon by HP Lovecraft

Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

The Iliad by Homer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Whores for Gloria by William T Vollmann

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Celebration by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Stony the Road – 5/5 Stars Yet another book that presented answers to questions in part, but mostly added to my reading list, this slight book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. was written to support a documentary and to provide additional resources, analysis, and insight into the post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods in the US. For a more robust understanding of the Reconstruction era, Gates points us to WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, which was one of the first extensive histories […]

The Road to Wellville – TC Boyle (1993)

The Road to Wellville by TC Boyle

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It’s c1909, and a small group of strangers are closing in on the breakfast cereal Mecca, Battle Creek, Michigan. It’s there that the San, Dr. Kellogg’s famous sanitarium awaits some of them, and the fast-paced novel cereal industry awaits others. Will and Eleanor Lightbody have recently gone through a personal tragedy, and are returning (well, Eleanor is) to the San for further treatment, while Will is joining for the first time. Charlie Ossining is a would-be cereal magnate who is bringing his seed money to […]

Hench – Natalie Zina Welschots (2020)

Hench by Natalie Zina Welschots

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Fast becoming a genre of its own, this book further takes on the superheroes as subjects of analysis in fiction mantle for the moment. Hench brings us Anna, a kind of wayward hench in between job…a free lancer by choice, who is playing around with the idea of taking on a permanent post. Her skills involve data analysis and other techie analyst skills. On a new job, she’s is significantly injured by the world’s most famous and possibly most powerful hero, Supercollider, and in her […]

Boy’s Life – Robert McCammon (1991)

Boy's Life by Robert McCammon

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It looks like this book is a lot more well-liked than my impressions of it. It’s a weird combination of IT by Stephen King (well, IT and maybe The Body) and Big Fish (or any other tall-tale infused novel). It’s also similar to the Dan Simmons novel Summer of Night that came out about the same time, almost as if the two authors each decided to write their version of IT as some kind of tribute. Like Summer of Night, I feel like this book […]



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