Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

…every single beautiful lie he had been told during the course of his childhood…

Werewolves in their Youth by Michael Chabon

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CBR11 BINGO: The Collection (BINGO! Remix corner to Summer Read corner) I don’t generally read very many short story collections. I like to dig into a story and often short fiction robs me of that a little bit. I’m invested and then it’s over. I think that’s why I tend to gravitate towards short story collections that are somehow linked by character or place. The connection is more satisfying for me. While Chabon’s collection here is not linked in that way, the stories are linked, in many […]

“It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.”

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

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Not what I was expecting! Actually, I’m not sure I was expecting anything? This little novella is Chabon’s homage to Sherlock Holmes, though his “old man” is never actually named in the story. It’s 1944, and our old man who may or may not definitely be a retired Sherlock Holmes, is living in Sussex, keeping his bees, and coming to terms with old age and a world that has moved on. This part of the story worked extremely well for me. It was so poignant […]

All plurals are ultimately singular.

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Packing My Library – 4/5 Stars This short memoir/thought piece takes it cue from the Walter Benjamin essay I will write about afterward and addresses what it means to pack one’s library away, presumably for good, as one heads into the final stages of life. Alberto Manguel is rounding on 70 and after decades of moving through and all over the world, he seems to have reached a place where he’s able to give up his library. His sentiments are especially interesting if you take […]

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.

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I have a whole Michael Chabon thing. I loved loved loved watching, then reading Wonder Boys when I was in high school. And then when The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay came out when I was in college, I read it in one or two fell swoops on a rain day from a summer job. I have been drinking up the rest of his novels since. I liked The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, kind of liked his nonfiction and YA novels, and thought his newest […]

A boy and his parrot.

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I’m a fan of a Michael Chabon. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” is an amazing book. “Telegraph Avenue” is one of my favorites as well. Those are serious tomes, so I was interested in reading this little book to see how he manages to encapsulate his general style of verbose prose into a novella. In 1944, a retired British detective in his twilight years is raising bees at his small cottage in the English countryside. He becomes involved in the investigation of a […]

Nope

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The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is in my top three favorite books and possibly occupies the top slot, but it took me a full hundred pages to get into it; I spent months trying to slog through the beginning of it and the last three quarters only took me days. For that reason I try to give Michael Chabon books more patience than I would others, but man did reading this feel like a chore. I may have referenced this in another review, but […]



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