Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

He leaned forward, his breath the smell of whiskey drunk straight from the bottle.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Congo by Michael Crichton

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This is a reread for both of these books, but it’s also possible I never read Congo — I did see the movie on HBO while babysitting in like 1997 and it’s truly awful. The book is also, not great, but it is a lot better than the movie. Fight Club, of course, I read right after watching the movie. Fight Club – 4/5 Stars This book mostly still holds up. Like the movie, of course, the satire (WHICH IS NOT SUBTLE ACTUALLY) does not […]

“It is difficult, after the passage of more than a century, to understand the extent to which the train robbery of 1855 shocked the sensibilities of Victorian England.” #CBRBingo – Money!

The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton

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I would love to see the movie version of this, which Crichton also wrote and directed. Sean Connery as Edward Pierce, the mastermind behind the robbery that threw Victorian England for a loop. He really was a smart guy. It’s obvious Crichton did his research about the period (apparently he became obsessed with the Victorian criminal underworld). The book is chock full of criminal slang. You catch the meaning eventually, and it certainly lends an atmosphere. This was a bit hard to get into at […]

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper.

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

My Mum is a Twat by Anoushka Warden

Bella Bella by Harvey Fierstein

Intimations by Zadie Smith

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton

Leviathan by Paul Auster

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Light of Day by Eric Ambler

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Humiliated and Insulted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rumble Fish by SE Hinton

Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani

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The Cruelest Month – 3/5 Stars This is the third Louise Penny “Inspector Gamache” detective novel, and I think it’s a decided dip in quality from an overarching look at it. The mystery itself, quaint, small town, punctuated with poetry and art and other little considerations is perfectly interesting. At a seance, from a combination of fright and maybe poisoning, a woman is found dead. There must be an elaborate set of circumstances to come to pass to have her die, but if they were […]

For a long time the horizon had been a monotonous flat blue line separating the Pacific Ocean from the sky.

Sphere by Michael Crichton

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This is a novel from 1986, and it feels like it. It’s funny though because it’s clearly the book that put us in some kind of mindset for stories in underwater facilities with contact with some kind of force–The Abyss and Leviathan among others. So the story begins almost identically to Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain where an event has happened and experts from a pre-selected team are called together to observe and report on the findings. It’s a classic setup anyway, but here we have a […]

When it all began, Paulo Aranha would have been bored.

The Andromeda Evolution by Daniel H Wilson

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

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The Andromeda Evolution – 2/5 Stars I read the Andromeda Strain for the first time last year and it’s mostly a very good and scary book about the dangers of human technology, human arrogance, and weirdly manliness! For a slim book about a disease potentially wiping humanity, there’s a lot of talk about men being men and having sex with women. Anyway, while this book is perfectly well-written and an almost hilarious parody of Michael Crichton’s stilted writing, this is a completely defanged thriller. It’s […]

There’s no theme with these!

The Indifferent Stars Aboe by Daniel James Brown

Followers by Megan Angelo

Timeline by Micahel Crichton

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The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown I don’t know how much the rest of America/the world learns about the Donner Party in school but for me, growing up in Northern California, it was local history and something that was taught to us in the fourth grade, probably right after we did the mission project. I enjoyed learning about the Donner Party at the time, because nine year olds are morbid little assholes who find people having to resort to cannibalism fascinating, but never […]



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