Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

End of year 2

The Chamber by John Grisham

The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes

The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud

Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell

Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell

Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell

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Dance to the Music of Time Vol 4 – 4/5 Books Do Furnish a Room This is the 10th (10th!!) book in the series and after the foray in the war, we’re right back where we started: discussing marriages and books in the UK. Specifically, we’re looking into the post-war publishing industry and discussing the state of literature now in 1945 or so. So where are? Well the Moderns (sic) have hung it up and we’ve moved into some other kind of thing that can’t […]

End of Year 1

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

Hamlet's Enemey by Theodore Lidz

Killing Floor by Lee Child

The Client by John Grisham

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

The Uplift War by David Brin

Monkey by Wu Cheng'en

Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard

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The Winter of Our Discontent – 4/5 This is John Steinbeck’s last novel and it begins with our narrator, Ethan Allen Hawley, trying to reckon with what it’s like to have once had money and then not to. He’s a veteran who came home to find his father had squandered the family fortune to make a risky investment (war profiteering) that didn’t pan out. So now a while on, married with two kids, Ethan works out a grocery store for an Italian ex-pat. He’s offered […]

The Rainmaker

The Rainmaker by John Grisham

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This is one of those other kinds of John Grisham novels. In general, even among his legal thrillers, there’s two types of John Grisham novels. The tightly-plotted thriller like The Pelican Brief or The Runaway Jury is one type. In this type, the pacing is fast, it’s a puzzle being formed in front of you, and it often involves a silly amount of machination and design to bring home a twisty kind of ending. In the other, like A Time to Kill and here, The […]

The Runaway Jury

The Runaway Jury by John Grisham

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CBR Bingo 14 – Holiday This book was on the shelf on my AirBnb this past week when I really needed something, not very taxing, to read and my books were failing me. I read this on vacation so if I liked it more than I might otherwise, blame that. I picked this up, had no clue what it was going to be about, and loved every stupid second of it. The novel begins with a just expert consulting group group spying on a man […]

The Pelican Brief – John Grisham (1992)

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

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This is the third John Grisham novel, and it’s the first one I remember coming out and being famous, after John Grisham was becoming famous. So it was the first NEW John Grisham being passed around by the adults in my life. It has a similar structure to The Firm in a way of promising something huge in concept and then being much smaller in execution. (The Firm’s big reveal feels so laughably small by the time we get to it, and this one has […]

A Beach Read on the Beach

Camino Island by John Grisham

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The wildest thing about this John Grisham book is that it’s not about lawyers. Our man John instead focuses on writers, books, heists, and French furntiure. It’s a welcome and pleasant departure for the reader as much as I’m sure it is for Grisham. It’s a fun little novel that would probably make a nice little Netflix limited run series. Or Paramount+, mayhaps. If you like fun but relaxing beach reads with a little bit of danger and sexiness – here you go.   Mercer […]



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