Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

July-August 2024 Leftovers

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

Confucius for Christians: What and Ancient Chinese Worldview Can Teach Us about Life in Christ by Greg A. Ten Elshof

Lucky At Cards by Lawrence Block

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner

Doing the Devil's Work by Bill Loehfelm

The Kneeling Man: My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Leta McCullough Seletzky

The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter

Burning Angel by James Lee Burke

The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright

Poetic Justice by Andrea J. Johnson

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Because I’ve been posting most of my reviews due to Bingo, I haven’t kept up with the leftover ones until now. Hope everyone had  a good summer. It’s my least favorite time of year but this one wasn’t so bad. Heartsick***: I took this book too seriously when I tried to read it the first time. I relaxed and enjoyed the ride the second. Goofy fun, nothing more. Brief Answers to the Big Questions****: I do enjoy listening to Hawking’s desire to push the boundaries […]

C I Yikes

Libra by Don DeLillo

Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer

The Ghost by Robert Harris

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Recently, I read three different books featuring CIA chicanery (two were fictional). This was unintentional but I figured since the themes were similar, I’d just batch review them rather than do individual ones. Libra***** This was a re-read. I liked it the first time. I loved it now that I: a. had a better since of the Oswald timeline after reading Posner’s Case Closed and b. could appreciate the meta-narrative structure in a way I couldn’t before. This is the only DeLillo book I can really […]

Patsy

Libra by Don DeLillo

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Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: Birthday. Lee Harvey Oswald’s birthday was October 18 (making him a libra, hence the title!). Two things are common with both mass shooters and high profile assassins: 1. They are almost always male. 2. They almost always have some sort of personality disorder which makes it difficult for them to fit into polite society. Fringe groups prey on these kinds of people. They suck their soul to the marrow, leave nothing left, and abandon them when their presence becomes an inconvenience. […]

Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left….

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So, much of my reading for CBR has come via audiobooks. Sadly, my work schedule has changed recently, thus depriving me of much of the time I have to listen to books, so I expect there’s no way I’m going to achieve my goal this year. But I’m still here, though, so I guess all is still well. I’m going to get this out of the way up front: I’m not a conspiracy theorist. 9/11 was the result of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists hijacking airliners. Chemtrails […]

Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren’t choices at all.

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Few writers can gut punch readers with an ending the way Stephen King can. Written in the first person, 11/22/63 is ominous from the start. But why it is so ominous takes over 850 pages to understand. For all his flaws with endings, the final lines are usually cutting. Take another story told in first person, The Green Mile. It’s only at the end, the very end, that the true cost of the story is revealed with that haunting final line “We each owe a […]



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