Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Spain and Not Plain

The Queen of the South by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

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I’ve been slumping lately due to stress at work and have mostly been hewing to light fiction (see Daisy Darker). I didn’t expect to connect with Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s literary crime novel when cycling through what I wanted to read next but the writing hooked me from page one and away we went. This is an interesting book. It’s good, very good. I’m not sure it’s great but I don’t want to dwell on that. I’ll focus on what I liked: it’s absolutely a retelling in some […]

A Brief History? Worth Every One of the 686 Pages.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

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As I descend further into dad-hood, I find myself being more patient for longer books and movies. I mean, I recently sat through 3:15 of Barry Lyndon and loved almost every minute of it. So I figured it was finally time to tackle this one, a book which I must’ve started three or four times only to put off due to its length and a lack of patience trying to understand the Jamaican patois. Better late than never ’cause this book is great. I’m finding more and […]

What This Cruel War Is About

El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord by Noah Hurowitz

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I’ve long avoided books about El Chapo, Mexican drug cartels, and other similar subjects because I think most US citizens have an outlandish view of how the drug trade actually works. In the brief encounters with Mexican drug cartels in fiction, the gangsters are portrayed as overly-tattooed, desperately violent and almost amoral. While there are, of course, shades of that in real life, it also shows a cartoonish image as an avatar for the average North American citizen’s inability to grapple with how its racist drug […]



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