Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Jack is back! Except nobody ever calls him Jack.

(Jack Reacher #4) Running Blind by Lee Child

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We meet up with our intrepid Reacher as he’s eating at an Italian restaurant he likes in New York. He sees two thugs trying to shake down the manager. As we know Jack Reacher, this will not stand. He decides that he’s going to take care of the problem before it becomes a problem. He asks the manager when the guys will be back for money, and then he intercepts them outside. Unfortunately, he’s being watched by two FBI agents while he smacks them around […]

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 […]

August 2022 Leftovers

Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy

Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself by K.C. Constantine

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees by Bob Klapisch and Pete Solotaroff

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

Finley Ball: How Two Outsiders Turned the Oakland As into a Dynasty and Changed Baseball Forever by Nancy Finley

Sea Change by Robert B. Parker

The Hunting Wives by May Cobb

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

Ms. Tree, Volume 1 by Max Alan Collins

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Some extra books I read in August. What a miserably hot month… Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood**** Less a conventional biopic on The Mick and more a look at his life vis-a-vis his legend and the backdrop of postwar America. Not as thorough as I would’ve liked but still riveting given how Jane Leavy presents her subject.   Greenwich Park*** Again glad I slept on my review. I really liked how this started but after a while, it morphed into […]

Deuce Ex Machina

Die Trying (Jack Reacher #2) by Lee Child

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I majored in English. Read some of the finest books known to man. I also like good food. Sometimes, though, I want McDonalds and Jack Reacher. You know it’s not High Art, but it doesn’t have to be. You don’t want it to be. You want it to be a McChicken and a milkshake and Jack Reacher beating the shit out of a white supremacist: it’s just really easy to wolf down.  Child doesn’t waste much time dropping us in the middle of some nefarious […]

Tom Cruise, though? REALLY?

The Killing Floor (Jack Reacher #1) by Lee Child

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I hate people who are good at everything.  I mean, doesn’t everyone? They are insufferable, whether or not they’re showing off their skills. And in the case of Jack Reacher, he’s doubly insufferable, because he still manages to be a fuck-up.  In this installment – the first one in a very, very long series – Jack Reacher is arrested on suspicion of murder. Having led a vagabond lifestyle after leaving the army, Reacher, on a whim, decides to get off the bus in the small, […]

My original title for this review was “Getting Blingy With It” and I feel like I deserve an award for that or possibly a slap in the face

Cleaning the Gold by Karin Slaughter and Lee Child

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GBI Agent Will Trent is working on a cold case: the murder of a sherrif’s deputy in a small Georgia town, twenty-odd years earlier. His most recent lead sends him undercover at Fort Knox, where his alias Jack Phineas Wolfe (no, really), army dropout, is hired to clean the gold. No, that’s what he’s hired to do. For real. Polish gold bars. This is not a euphemism; he’s inside a room with his suspect, polishing bars and getting sweaty. The suspect, by the way, is […]



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