Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ship Breaker – Paolo Bacigalupi (2010)

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

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CBR13Bingo – Machinery A book that took me a few false starts to get into. For one, this book is bleak. It’s version of the world involves young children and adolescents eschewing childhood into a life of pure survival. If you’re old enough you can work light crew, finding the wiring, odds and ends, and other manageable salvage from old ships on the Gulf coast. Once you’re old enough, you can move on to heavy crew. Nailer is still on light crew when he falls […]

The River – Peter Heller (2019)

The River by Peter Heller

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CBR13Bingo – The Wilds This is a consummate river novel. There’s been a few of those over the years like Deliverance, Heart of Darkness, and The African Queen. This one shares some of the sensibilities of especially Deliverance, with some atmospheric qualities of nature writers. Two friends from college have decided to spend their summer canoeing, hunting, fishing, and camping in the far Canadian northeast. Early one, they run across two “fat Texans” who are drunk or high, and hear the faint traces of a […]

Dimestore – Lee Smith (2016)

Dimestore by Lee Smith

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CBR13Bingo – Home A short memoir that’s not exactly a memoir. Instead, this short book by Lee Smith is a series of topical essays about her memoir. They tie together in the sense of their being all part of her life, but the individual parts are much more interesting than the whole. They don’t hang together, but treated separately they’re wonderful. If you don’t know Lee Smith, you should! She’s from a small town in the far western mountains of Virginia. From where I lived, […]

Inferno – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1975)

Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell

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CBR13Bingo – Mythic Like Dante’s Inferno, this book is more of a time capsule than a truly interesting reading experience. Unless I completely missed it, and I might have, it’s not as thickly layered with criticism and allusion to much more obscure and more “minor” sinners the way Dante’s is, and instead tries to hit the big bads. Instead of Virgil, his guide is Mussolini, hinting at the more fallen nature of classicism in the 20th century. If Virgil was the cultural historian of Rome/Italy […]

Saga of the Swamp Thing vol 1- Alan Moore (1982)

Saga of the Swamp Thing vol 1 by Alan Moore

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CBR13Bingo – Flora Some of the other reviews mention that this one is a little rough compared to where this series will go. Good…I liked it and found it interesting, but not super compelling. It felt very much like a time capsule or like listening to a somewhat immature first album that shows a lot of promise. Swamp Thing is a weird one. I watched the movie as a kid, but the story, the pathos, the ideas don’t really stick with me. I suppose I […]

Before the Storm – Rick Perlstein (2001)

Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein

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CBR13Bingo: People (check out Barry G on this cover) “Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;” So this is a 2001 history of the Republican Party starting in about 1955 or so and moving through election night (and a tiny bit thereafter) in 1964. If you’ve read Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” you already know a lot about the feel of the feeling of conservatism around this time. In addition, another oddly positioned book The Day […]



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