Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Spying ain’t Glamorous, yo

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John LeCarre

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  Here’s a clever piece of writing advice: when your plot involves your characters carrying out a plan, don’t tell us what the plan is unless it is going to fail. If it’s going to fail, the reader needs to know what it is beforehand in order to understand how it falls apart. If it’s not going to fail, then it’s pointless to explain it to your readers twice. In The Spy who Came in from the Cold, John LeCarre doesn’t tell us about Britain’s […]

Less thriller, more meditation

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

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American Spy opens with a literal bang, the way most spy novels do. But then it becomes something different – more of a memoir, more of a reckoning with the past that led to the opening shot. Marie, the titular spy, is the lone black female employee in her FBI field office. Attacked in her home, she flees New York to her mother’s country of Martinique; meanwhile, she reflects on her girlhood with her sister, now deceased, and her time as a spy during the […]

Who Spies on the Spies?

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Read for the CBR Bingo: Cover The challenge of Alan Moore’s legendary graphic novel Watchmen is how to make the superheroes in that universe accountable when they do things outside of their government’s control. This leads to the famous tagline “Who watches the Watchmen?” Such a lens is turned on espionage in Le Carré’s famed novel which, despite being in print for almost fifty years, was given a new cover for its recent round of Penguin re-publishing that will instantly be seen as iconic. I am middle-brow […]

Like a Warm Blanket

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I, Lucifer by Peter O’Donnell (1967) – Some books are comfort food.  I grab them when I don’t want to read anything complicated.  The Modesty Blaise books by Peter O’Donnell are fine examples and sit on a convenient shelf in my library.  I have them all (thirteen novels but none of the comic strips), and they are a little formulaic but definitely re-readable. Modesty, if you didn’t happen to see several of the really bad movies made about her, is basically James Bond with décolletage.  […]

“Hm,’ said Bond. ‘Bogeyman stuff.”

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I had fallen off pace for my goal this year (I’m still 2 books behind, better than the 8 I was a month ago), and an Audible coupon delivered a few, short, James Bond books to my queue. Surely I could knock out an under 7-hour book in under a week of commuting? Well, that plan only works if the book is enjoyable and you can make yourself listen to it. A quick note: my problems with this book were not the narration stylings of […]

Bad Feet

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Dancer is a trade paperback collection of Nate Edmondson’s five part series of the same name. It was published by Image in 2012. In the first chapter, a grizzled old American and his Irish ballerina girlfriend are chased by police and an assassin. The assassin, it turns out, looks an awfully lot like the grizzled old American.On paper, Dancer sounds like a fantastic book. Image has been on fire, lately, Edmondson is working on major books like Punisher and Black Widow, and the premise is […]



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