Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

August 2023 Leftovers

Red Cat by Peter Spiegelman

You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy

Gangland by Chuck Hogan

Death and the Good Life by Richard Hugo

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexa Coe

Britt-Marie Was Here by Frederik Backman

Occupied City by David Peace

Sleepless City by Reed Farrel Coleman

Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum

Run Time by Cathy Ryan Howard

Loyalty by Lisa Scottoline

None Of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

The Club by Ellery Lloyd

Not in Bronxville by Rita K. Farrelly

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Unquestionably the worst month in the calendar. Red Cat*** It’s not the writer’s fault that I just finished Robert Kolker’s excellent Lost Girls in light of the apprehension of the man they think is the Gilgo Beach murderer. But my threshold for murdered sex workers was low going into this. I only finished it because it filled a specific square for my library summer reading game. It’s not bad; the mystery is done well but it doesn’t stand out as far as the rest of […]

May-July Leftovers

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Tripwire by Jack Reacher

Baby Moll by John Farris

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Boyle

The Laundromat: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich

X by Davey Davis

Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship by Harvey Araton

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham

Ex Machina Book Four by Brian K. Vaughan

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite

Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond

That Kind of Danger by Donna Masini

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Spenser Confidential by Ace Atkins

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I usually do these at the end of the month but then I went through a big reading slump March-May. And then I roared back but realized I was behind. So apologies for this being so long. There Will Be Fire **** A good, readable text on a moment in history I knew little about. Even after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, I still had a lot of problem keeping track of all the socio-political dynamics so it’s good that Rory Carroll makes it accessible […]

To Bomb Atomically

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

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One of my all-time favorite movies is The Hunt for Red October. I can never get over one of those opening scenes where the Red October’s political officer is reading from a book owned by ship captain Marko Raimius, played by Sean Connery. The officer reads the line “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.” I still recall their exchange, with Connery doing his parts in his typical gravelly patrician tone: Connery: It was said by an American. PO: American? Connery: Mmmhmm. He invented the atomic […]

A Civil Rights Icon

My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King

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Like many white folk who studied the Civil Rights Movement on a surface level, I always assumed Coretta Scott King fully played the Dutiful Wife. She tended to the children, kept the house, lifted the spirits of her famous husband, mourned with dignity and carried on his legacy as she got older. Well, she did do those things. But she did so much more and she deserves to be remembered as more than The Wife. I’ve always had a curiosity about Coretta Scott King ever […]

Gripping story of resilience

Hostage by Guy Delisle

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CBR15Passport books from different countries Hostage is the true story of Christophe Andre, a Frenchman working for Doctors Without Borders in Chechnya who was kidnapped and held for three months. Guy Delisle, a French illustrator and writer, interviewed Andre after his ordeal and turned the taped interviews into a gripping work of graphic biography.  In order to place things in context I had to read up a bit on the Chechen/Russian war of 1994-96. The events in this story take place after that conflict had […]

The People Make the Place

The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City by Sam Roberts

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New York City has seen nearly a billion inhabitants in its 400 year long history, and a great many of them have been very remarkable. But there are also many how had an indelible impact on the city, even if they are mostly forgotten today. I do not like New York City. I am a Bostonian through and through. But I’ve been there many times, and I must admit that there is really no other place like it. The city has a strange essence to […]



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