Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

There Goes The Neighborhood

Echo Park by Michael Connelly

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Cityscape. My cover has a cityscape photo of Los Angeles in the background, with Echo Park presumably in the foreground. As I said in my last review of a Michael Connelly book (City of Bones, which I liked), you know from the start usually whether or not it’s going to be a good Harry Bosch tale. This one was lacking, though it had its moments. A seasoned mystery reader is going to see how a story like this unfolds from […]

LAish

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

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The thing with Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels is that I can tell in the first 20 pages if it’s going to be a good one or not. Trunk Music and Concrete Blonde are examples of the good ones, A Darkness More Than Night and Angel’s Flight less so. One just seems to know in advance how Connelly is going to hit his beats and if said beats are going to work with you. This one really worked for me and, while almost all of Connelly’s novels are set in Los Angeles, this […]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the (reading) Weekend…

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg John-Barker, Julia Scheele (illustration)

Widespread Panic by James Ellroy

Quarry's Cut by Max Allan Collins

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Read a variety of books close to and over the weekend. Let’s check it out… Bleeding Edge **** This is a 2021 reread and it’s better than I remember. The ending disappoints but it’s still an entertaining, prescient novel. Pynchon warned us about Too Online culture and yet, here we are.   Times Square Red, Times Square Blue **** I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this. And I liked it! Mostly. This is like a tale of two books. It’s two essays […]

Ghost in the Machine

U Up? by Cate Disabato

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In the end, this one receives the thinnest of four stars. I’m nudging it over the line because I think it has a lot going for it, even with the protagonist driving me absolutely bonkers for the last 20-30 pages. I guess I should start with the positives: I like Catie Disabato’s writing. She has a gift for creating real, believable characters, even the ghost ones. Her vision of how witchcraft works in this world: that mediums have the power to see ghosts, with certain […]

Ol’ Hollywood

Windhall by Ava Barry

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Sigh. Why can’t books like this be easier to review? There’s so much to like about Ava Barry’s debut novel Windhall…and so much that grated on my nerves. I really wanted to push this to a charity first-book-4-star review and I just couldn’t. The book kind of feels like the version of the decaying mansion at the center of the story: beautiful and glamorous but uninhabitable and far past its prime. Probably easier with this one to pull out the old good/bad formula: Good: -The book […]

“Everyone loves a beautiful dead girl.”

Windhall by Ava Barry

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Windhall is a novel about Hollywood, the way men treat women, fame, obsession, and Los Angeles. Hailey is an antisocial journalist at a counterculture zine turned blog (I think) in LA. He is obsessed with the decades old murder of a Hollywood star at the home of an infamous director. His obsession weaves in with his own family’s story, as well as the DNA of modern day Los Angeles. It’s hard for him to separate the glamour and allure of the city with the facts, […]



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