Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I would

Cold Storage by David Koepp

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“From the screenwriter of Jurassic Park!” screams the cover.  Which Jurassic Park?  Original Flavour or New Generation?  No idea.  This is another Mum recommendation, but much more successful than the previous effort.  We actually picked her up a Bargain Box of Books for Christmas 2021, $100 for 30ish crime fiction novels that she’s spend the year reading. I enjoyed it much, much more than expected.  There were a few moments that actually had me laughing out loud. So, and bear with me here because it’s […]

Assorted Short Fiction II

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

Yard Work by David Koepp

Anonymous by Uzodinma Iweala

There's a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed by Edgar Cantero

The Remedy by Adam Haslett

Falls the Shadow by Skip Horack

Screwball by Simon Rich

The Beckoning Fair One by Dan Chaon

Q&A by Ben Winters

Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry

Decorum at the Deathbed by Josh Malerman

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Night of the Mannequins – 3/5 Stars – Stephen Graham Jones This is a newish novella from Stephen Graham Jones that you’ll have to roll with the bad title and go with it because it does some very interesting things. It has a significant flaw by the end, and the way I will describe that is that it either doesn’t trust the audience or trust itself to make the more interesting choice. The plot involves a group of teenagers, friends and frenemies, who friend works […]

In June of 2016 my wife, Jen, and I took our fourteen-month-old daughter, Oona, to the Nantucket Film Festival.

The New One by Mike Birbiglia

My Vanishing Country by Bakari Sellers

Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter

Hey Rube by Hunter S Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Nickle Brickle'Bee by Sterling Nixon

Cold Storage by David Koepp

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The Mark of Zorro by Johnson McCulley

The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

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The New One – 3/5 Stars This is the second Mike Birbiglia book I’ve read, after Sleepwalk with Me, and it’s good in the ways that comedians’ books are good and bad in the way that comedians’ books are bad (though this is a general issue with the form more than this specific book). Mike Birbiglia’s career is interesting in part because of the way he clearly got taken up by “Big Storytelling” around 2009 or so, and the opportunities to write movies that came […]

I for one, welcome our new fungus overlords

Cold Storage by David Koepp

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There’s a lot of theory about what various monsters represent about our collective fears. Obviously we have Frankenstein’s monster as a representation of science without morality or consideration for the outcome of their tinkering. Godzilla was the modern version of that with a nuclear twist. Vampires are black mirrors of seduction; Wolfmen are cautions against reverting to our primal nature. And, of course, zombies. Zombies are so ripe for metaphorical interpretation, from concerns about consumerism (hey there Romero) to a concern that others aren’t who […]

Tacoma calls, it’s waiting there to get rid of us all, when the big one comes better hope the car don’t stall.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Weirdly, my cannonball thus far has been strongly apocalyptic, which has been… interesting in light of current events. You’d think that this would make me more anxious, but paradoxically I’m looking at the real world and thinking “eh, people are hoarding toilet paper, but every grocery store I’ve been to has been relatively full if you’re not hyper specific about what you want. No one is stealing out of each others carts or housejacking like in The Mandibles” (Lionel Shriver’s book about the financial collapse […]

If You Mixed The Andromeda Strain and Pacific Rim, You’d Get This

Cold Storage by David Koepp

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It took me a while to get this whole reading thing going again, and I figured what would finally jumpstart it would be a good old goofy disease thriller. Folks, I was not wrong. According to my e-reader’s stats, it took me a little over five hours to finish this book, and that seems about right. The plot starts out very similar to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain: Some kind of organism has hitched a ride back to earth after getting mutated in space and has […]



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