Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Strangers in their Own Land – Arlie Russell Hochschild (2016)

Strangers in their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

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I had to jump down to the one and two star reviews of this book to make sense of what book the four and five star reviews were reading. Perhaps purely as a form of sociology this book succeeds. But the absolute embarrassingly flawed premise of this book, backed up by the promoting of the same mythology it seeks to understand, and the complete erasure of gigantic parts of the country are not only wrongheaded and bizarre, but actively harmful. Update: I thought about it […]

Purity – Jonathan Franzen (2015)

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

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I don’t recall as much about Freedom as I do The Corrections, but this book, the up until soon most recent Jonathan Franzen indulges in some of Franzen’s best and worst habits. There’s whole sections of this book that read like the “Chip in Eastern Europe” section of the Corrections writ large. I mention that because I know several people who love that book and hate that part. One of my most discerning professors held that opinion. The story here is Great Expectations. Purity does […]

Book Lust – Nancy Pearl (2003)

Book Lust by Nancy Pearl

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It’s not just because we’re deep into Goodread territory here, but I feel like many of us are past the need for a Book of Lists like we have here. This review isn’t based on the concept as a whole. How do you find the books you’re interested in reading? There’s still books that I want to read that my brother read for college classes and told me about during the summers home when I was still in high school. I still have a list […]

The Sixth Extinction – Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

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Whenever I read about climate change, I think about that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard to zapped into the consciousness of a man on a dying planet. It’s the one where he plays the fife. For me, maybe that’s where we are now, but there’s no space ships to save us from the oncoming doom. The pandemic has shown that when push comes to shove, that we might very well be doomed. I saw this from a American viewpoint, and maybe […]

News of the World – Paulette Jiles (2016)

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

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I read this when it came out and remembered really liking it, and returning to it a few years later intensified that enjoyment. This book lives in the short period of time right after the Civil War. We’re in Texas, and Captain Kidd is a newsreader, travelling from town to town to read the world news (trying to avoid local news as much as possible) to anyone willing to pay a dime. He’s the veteran of three wars, and Texas is currently in the throes […]

The Turnout – Megan Abbott (2021)

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

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The new Megan Abbott book, which has become a kind of yearly/bi-yearly affair since I started reading her first with Dare Me. Maybe Dare Me was the worst book of hers to start with because even when I’ve really enjoyed her books, I feel like I’ve been chasing that one. The new book takes place in a ballet studio in the US in more or less contemporary times. We have a few clues like cellphone and a vape pen, but like ballet itself, this book […]



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