Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

April 2024 Leftovers

X = : Poems by Stephen Berg

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

A Game of Lies by Clare Mackintosh

The Hurricane Blonde by Halley Sutton

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais

Watch It Burn by Kristen Bird

Sleep With Strangers by Dolores Hitchens

The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn by Josh Young

One of Us Is Wrong by Sam Holt

The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker

The Second Murderer by Denise Mina

Blackmailer by George Axelrod

The Darkest Glare: A Story of Murder, Blackmail, and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles by Chip Jacobs

Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith

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Happy April, y’all! X = : Poems**** This is why library book bingos are necessary. I only checked this one out because I needed to read a book of poems and I wanted to check the nettlesome “X” off the A-Z reading list. A convoluted reason to begin with and this wasn’t even the book I thought I was getting! I thought I’d get a different X by a different author. I’m glad I got this one. Some of these really spoke to me, including […]

I couldn’t put it down

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

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CBR Bingo: Gateway (favorite genre: Mystery) I love a good mystery, and this is a good mystery. I was surprised, actually, by how much I enjoyed this since typically this kind of hardboiled, seedy-underbelly, protagonist has seen some shit mysteries aren’t the type of mystery I go for. Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is a WWII vet living in LA in the late 40s, down on his luck, who is approached by a man offering a lot of money if Easy can find a woman who’s gone […]

Sunset Strip

Little Green by Walter Mosley

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One of my all-time favorite movies is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Featuring Elliot Gould in a great star turn as Phillip Marlowe who is deposited in the 1970s as a fish-out-of-water cynical private eye, Altman does a fantastic job of contrasting the post-war male angst of the 50s with the post-60s hypershift in American culture. And oh yeah, there’s a mystery to solve. Chronologically, there’s no gap between Little Green and Cinnamon Kiss, Mosley’s previous Easy Rawlins book. The former picks up a few months after where the latter […]

To Live and Die in LA

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

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After going through most of Walter Mosley’s Leonid McGill series, I decided to switch back to the books that drew me to his work in the first place: good ol’ Easy Rawlins. Having read most of the McGill books (and unlike the Rawlins series, they’re mostly the same in terms of plot and tone) I have a fresh perspective on the Rawlins ones and Mosley’s evolution as a writer. McGill has always felt like the character Mosley wanted to write but didn’t get to until […]

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley

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Dreams have always featured heavily in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series. But this one in particular had a lot of dream sequences and descriptions of dreams. It kind of wore on me after awhile; I felt like Mosley was trying to stuff extra scenes to raise his page count since the plot was so thin. I don’t know what it’s like dealing with publishers but note to writers: if you can get away with a good story in 190 or 220 pages, it’s cool. I […]

The Detective Who Makes Black Lives Matter

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I’ve read most of Walter Mosley’s underrated Easy Rawlins series and, while this is far from the best, this is probably his rawest work. It’s also perhaps an apology for how he has written for female characters in the past. Taking place in the shadow of the 1965 uprising in Watts led by black citizens after yet another act of police brutality, it lends a setting that is never far from the events of the story. Whereas, Mosley contextualizes in Easy’s dialogue about the circumstances […]



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