Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale

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Read as part of CBR11 bingo: First in the Hap and Leonard series. Joe R. Lansdale is one of those writers I’ve always been meaning to get to but never had the time for. His bibliography, while prolific, is not as readily available at the used bookstores I enjoy perusing, nor are many of them at my local library (I had to buy this copy from The Mysterious Bookshop). And when I did try one of his popular ones, The Bottoms, I found it to be […]

An Homage to an Homage to Twin Peaks?

The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh

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I added The Blinds to my Goodreads list a couple years ago when writer Adam Sternbergh gave an intriguing interview to Texas Monthly magazine. It was all about his travel through Texas to research what West Texas was really like so he could nail it in the book. Since The Blinds was recently a Kindle deal, I nabbed it and gave it a go. At times, the writing is fantastic – fatalistically and pithily humorous. Kind of like a mix of Raymond Chandler and Catch-22. Unfortunately, the back […]

Cowboys Like Us…

The Final Country by James Crumley

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This book inspired the title for the seventh episode of this season’s True Detective. When I finally finished Dave Halberstam’s wonderful-but-exhausting The Best and the Brightest, I decided to pick it up since it was the latest Crumley in my stack. And it might be my favorite. I’ve always liked the Milo books more than the Sughrue ones. There’s really no difference between the two characters; they’re both old, gruff alky war vets who function as ancillaries for the author. But for whatever reason, the three Milo books […]

Caught out in the rain in the most dangerous Magic Tree House mission yet!

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By my count, this is number 16 in my bingo journey and The Last in a Series! The Magic Treehouse series is an interesting one. Ever since I have heard about it, I wanted to read one. However, I have only read some of the non-fiction companions to the fiction stories and some of her non-Treehouse books. When the read the last in a series came up on the bingo board, I figured why not? Well, the problem is, there are series within the series! […]

Texas noir. #CBRBingo

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Project: Catch Up On Review Backlog commences. No promises on the quality of my next ten or so reviews. I just want to get them done. (This will probably unfortunately result in subpar reviews for books that deserve much better.) Let’s start with a book I finished over a month ago, Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke. First things first, this book was incredibly well done. It’s a crime book set in Texas, featuring a black Texas Ranger as its protagonist. I knew that going in. […]

She had me at Dolly Parton.

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Dumplin’, whose real name is Willowdean, is a smart, kind, capable, funny, and fat (her term) 16-year-old in small-town Texas. Being sixteen is sucky enough, am I right?!, but the “fat” part causes even more trouble than one would expect for Dumplin’ since her mom is the local pageant queen-turned-pageant director, still living on her own pageant days, staying thin to fit in a 30-year-old dress. She was herself once Miss Teen Blue Bonnet and you better believe that’s a big effin’ deal in Clover […]



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