Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Pioneer Woman

Frontier Grit: The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women by Marianne Monson

The Paper Daughters of Chinatown by Heather B. Moore

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Frontier Grit – 3.5 stars In this book we meet twelve women who traversed the American frontier in search of their dreams, though what these dreams were and the paths they took to them vary extraordinarily. As a child I devoured Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Though I’ve have quite a lot of bubbles burst about her depiction of her childhood (check out Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires to learn more), my interest in those so-called pioneers who tried to ‘tame’ the Wild West still persists, […]

“Looks like rain…”

11 Unabridged Stories from The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard by Elmore Leonard

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Western stories are horror stories. Desolation. Solitude. The Unknown. Monsters. That’s what they’re always about. I think that’s why I like them so much – they strip civilization down to a skeleton and then they ask the most basic questions. What kind of person are you, really? What would you do to live? Would you rather survive, or keep your character intact? Can you do both? This collection of Elmore Leonard’s Western stories was recently on sale as an audiobook, and most of the stories […]

Still not caught up on my reviews, but I’m working on it.

Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

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I’m doing terribly at keeping up with my reviews this year, so I’m going to do a review dump. Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry (4.5/5) (Spoilers abound.) Lonesome Dove was a revelatory experience for me. It was that rare experience that I knew to appreciate while I was reading it. Rather than devouring the book and then mourning it’s end, I was able to savor the novel and drag it out a little bit. I was still a little skeptical about reading the follow-up, […]

An elegiac paean that didn’t convey what it’s author wanted

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

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In 1981, Bruce Springsteen was in talks with Paul Schrader to star in a musical that would, six years later, become Light of Day, and starred Michael J. Fox in one of his first non-comedic roles. The film was originally titled Born in the U.S.A., which Springsteen would use to title a song he’d been working on about a Vietnam veteran. After going through several home demo permutations, it would eventually be the center-point for his 1984 multi-platinum album of the same name, and helped […]

What’s in the trunk Adelaide?

Lone Women by Victor LaValle

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Adelaide Henry is a woman on the run. She is traveling to Montana to take advantage of the offer of free land to homesteaders regardless of gender, dragging only an enormous steamer trunk behind her. Adelaide isn’t the only lone woman in Montana with secrets. Can she escape her past? What happens if she stops trying? Little House on the Prairie this is not. I picked this book up on the strength of past works by this author that I’ve enjoyed and was not disappointed. […]

For one reason or another, I did not finish these

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

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Fingerprints of the Gods (1 star) I’ve always been fascinated by the world of constructed reality, whether it be conspiracy theory or pseduoscience or just general disinformation and propaganda. Fascinated in a “I hate this so much but can’t disengage because I must punish myself for some inexplicable reason” kind of way. When I was in college, I spent an embarrassingly large amount of my free time arguing with young earth creationists on the internet. It so interested me that I wrote my thesis on […]



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