Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

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Typical Stephen King – slow burner, horror doesn’t really hit until middle to end of book and opens with a tragedy. Mike Noonan is a famous novelist who’s wife dies secondary to a brain aneurysm while leaving the pharmacy with a pregnancy test – yes, she was pregnant. Mike eventually decides to travel to him and his late wife’s summer home – a placed called Sara Laughs. Almost immediately, Mike is having some pretty odd dreams. There’s also some paranormal stuff going on inside his […]

Misery is Brutal

Misery by Stephen King

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Let me start by saying, Stephen King isn’t for everyone. I think even he knows this. For me and my brother, he’s a legend. I remember being little and seeing an old copy of Desperation on my dad’s nightstand. I have since read it a couple of times. I honestly was never drawn to Misery because the story itself was honestly a bit boring to me. I had seen the movie with Kathy Bates and James Caan. I never found it that frightening – then, […]

The master at some of his best work (Belated Bingo – White Whale)

11/22/63 by Stephen King

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I’m a big fan of Stephen King. I’ve read many of the classics (Pet Sematary, The Shining, It, Misery, Salem’s Lot, Firestarter,  Needful Things) some of the zany ones (Christine and Rose Madder)  and I think my favorite, the most not-put-down-able for me, was The Stand. All that said I find him pretty uneven and sort of have to steel myself for his typical writing style. For folks that haven’t read any of his books, the way I describe it is that it is always […]

Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.

Black House by Stephen King

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This is the final Stephen King book for me. I don’t mean I am done reading him, but I have now read all his books. And I think I am pretty close to reading everything he’s ever published. Though I might have some odds and ends from especially epublishing days. Unfortunately, I think this book is kind of awful. It’s the sequel to The Talisman, a book I thought well of but don’t recall a lot of reading it, and this book was almost very […]

For me, the terror–the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and bogeys which might have been living in my own mind–began on an afternoon in October of 1957.

Danse Macabre by Stephen King

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This is one of those Stephen King books my brother and I owned but never got around to reading, and I think for the most part that’s a good thing. The book itself, written by King when he was like 33 or so, is a collection of literary analysis (or more so cultural analysis) of horror genre (fiction, movies, radio, and tv) and is written at about the depth of solid criticism (while constantly averring about in depth scholarly analysis). I came away from it […]

I was not sorry when my brother died.

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill

House Made of Dawn by Scott Momaday

The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

The Regulators by Stephen King

The Catherine Wheel by Jean Stafford

The Ascent of Rum Doodle by WE Bowman

The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

A Bullet in the Ballet by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon

Skellig by David Almond

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Nervous Conditions – 4/5 This is one of those books that has been around for awhile, was highly lauded when it came out, and made the rounds in a few college courses and high school English departments. It was even given to me as a possible book to teach my first year of teaching for tenth graders. I promptly declined because I was brand new and didn’t have time to read something and create material for it. And I will be honest, I don’t like […]



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