Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street – Helene Hanff (1973)

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

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Not quite as lovely as 84 Charing Cross, but charming in its own right. The first book is just a perfect little book that lives in its gaps. What we learn and what we know feel like gifts and the spaces between the years allow for life to continue on. That book was a series of letters between consummate New Yorker Helene Hanff who can’t get her hands on obscure and wonderful English books that she wants to read. So she begins a correspondence with […]

What You are Going Through – Sigrid Nunez (2020)

What You are Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

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Yes it’s a new Sigrid Nunez novel with an animal on the cover and the book is about the death of a friend. But it’s not the same! First off, this has cats, but it’s not about cats. Not really. “The cat came in on little fog feet.” The book is about a narrator who has been asked to help a friend live out the remaining days after her cancer has returned. She was in remission, and the experimental treatments worked, and so the pain […]

Mantel Pieces – Hilary Mantel (2021)

Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel

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I will be honest, you have to be into this for the book to be enjoyable. I know that’s true about any book, but unlike a lot of essay collections from authors, whether they’re themed or not, this one is very particular about what it is, that it’s harder to dip in an out of this one like you might for a different kind of book. These are reprinted and collected essays from Hilary Mantel that she wrote for the London Review of Books, and […]

The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides (2011)

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

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I know a lot of people either didn’t like this or felt it was underwhelming. I also think the more years we move away from Middlesex, the more we won’t talk about it (a book I love, but imagine won’t hold up years down the line). In this novel, we find ourselves at Brown in 1982 on the eve of graduation. Madeleine is hungover, expecting her parents, and regretting “something” she did last night, even if it wasn’t technically sex. At breakfast she and her […]

How to Be Alone – Jonathan Franzen (2007)

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

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I think I went through a period where I decided that I would dislike Jonathan Franzen. He’s kind of a punching bag for a lot of people, and some of that is earned and some of that is unearned. I think in part people associate him with that list of writers who got their start in the 1980s, who are mostly white, mostly male, and range from elitist (by reputation) or l’enfants terribles. And for whatever reason, despite my being a generation younger than these […]

Civil War: A Narrative part III – Shelby Foote (1974)

Civil War: A Narrative part III by Shelby Foote

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The final book in the Shelby Foote narrative history series. We begin with an ill-thought Red River Texas campaign and end with the fallout and early history of Reconstruction. The title suggests we end at Appomattox Courthouse, but the book takes us well beyond there. This book still has all the same problems as the other two: lost cause bullshit at times, and a barely masked focus more on Jefferson Davis and Lee than on Lincoln. Grant is given full shrift here, but that might […]



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