Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Too Clever For Its Own Good

The Paragon Hotel by Lindsay Faye

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Bingo Square: The Roaring 20’s I loved Lindsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham and already had a copy of this book – seemed like the perfect fit for the 20’s. From the topic matter and description, it was but I was incredibly disappointed with this novel, especially since it should have been my cup of tea. The narrator is Alice “Nobody” James – as the novel begins, she is on a train, heading to Portland, Oregon with a gunshot wound, fleeing her former life in […]

Wave After Wave, Slowly Drifting…

The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow

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A few days ago, I read Martin Scorsese’s interview reflecting on The Irishman and his career in general. A small tidbit in the interview was that he and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro had passed on adapting The Winter of Frankie Machine in the aughts. De Niro read it and liked it, almost as much as he did I Heard You Paint Houses, which was adapted into The Irishman.  The Irishman was one of the better movies I saw in 2019. I’m a big Martin Scorsese fan. When I read that […]

La Famiglia

Mafia Dynasty by John Davis

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Since watching The Irishman, I’ve had a yen for Mafia crime stories. I’ve always wanted to know more about the Gambino family since they were the most powerful of the five families during the time the mob ran everything. So I picked this lauded work up. It gave me everything I need in the best way possible: being detailed without being tedious. It covers the families coming over from Italy and Sicily, how what we know to be the “mafia” came into existence and how the […]

Portrait of the Gangster as a Man

The Mad Ones: Crazy Joey Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld by Tom Folsm

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As I get older, I try to take myself, and my reading tastes, less seriously. There was a time where I fancied myself a Very Important Book Reviewer that would choke the life out of anything I read in order to critique it with skill. It’s silly, at least from my perspective. I love reading and I love writing reviews but they’re just that: reviews. Chronicling the things I read, if I liked them or not, and if I would recommend them. No more, no […]

Winners Take All

Casino by Nicholas Pileggi

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Continuing my rather unexpected trip through books that inspired Martin Scorsese films (I finished I Heard You Paint Houses a week ago), here’s Nicholas Pileggi’s Casino. I was excited to read it because: I watched the movie years ago and remember almost nothing about it. I recently watched Hustlers and people kept comparing it to Casino. I enjoyed Pileggi’s other true crime mafia tale Wiseguy, which was the basis for the movie Goodfellas So I went into this one with a lot of excitement. And it’s…fine. Just fine. Pileggi’s style is much more to […]

The Irishman

I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt

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I Heard You Paint Houses is not a good book. It’s like reading a court transcript with historical footnoting, which made it a slog for me to read. Maybe Charles Brandt’s other books are better because he’s more interested in editorializing his subject’s reminiscence instead of just putting it out there with minimal context and background work. However, the book did what it needed to do for me. I’m a big Martin Scorsese fan and this is the inspiration for his newest movie The Irishman. Instead of looking […]



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