Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The triumphant return of the Constant Reader

The Outsider by Stephen King

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I am a die-hard ‘constant reader’ of Stephen King, who has ridden the rollercoaster of almost all of his novels (particularly his classics). He is such prolific author, reliably churning out page-turners each year, so it is incredibly easy to just stick with his stable. In recent years, however, I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid his allure. I’ve tried my best to branch out, read new things. … But for my 6th Cannonball Read selection, I fell back into old habits. The Outsider is […]

“When the mind’s filter disappeared, the big picture disappeared with it. There was no forest, only trees. At its worst, there were no trees, either. Just bark.”

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The reviews on Uncle Stevie’s latest tome have been mostly similar: a great, suspenseful first half, telling a story about a police investigation into the brutal murder of a child by a seemingly innocent man…and a less successful second half, filled with supernatural elements and a character from earlier novels. Most reviews have pointed out that the story presented in the first half were quite enough for a full novel: local good citizen arrested for horrific crime, town turns against him and his family, regardless […]

The first half of this book is excellent, the second half a little less so.

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So I did the audio on this one, and I definitely think that affected my reading, for the better. Will Patton is a good narrator (he’s the same one who narrated the Bill Hodges trilogy). Sometimes books are significantly affected by a good or bad audiobook narrator, so I just wanted to say up front that I think that is going on here for me, and I think you should know that going in. I probably would have been less forgiving without the audio. Some slight […]

An amazing but ultimately explicable act of legerdemain?

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Texas Dracula. But also a murder mystery and police procedural. So the new Stephen King is pretty much the old Stephen King in terms of subject-matter, the plot and narrative, and even a recurring character (whose cameo I was not so sure about…but it turned out ok). And the result of familiarity mixed with 2018’s general sense of things (there’s an AIR of Trump in this novel, but not that much)…and the significant change of setting makes this is a solid book in general. It’s […]

Another Student Recommendation

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Again, when a students tells you a book is their favorite and is super excited by it, you have to read it. Ricardo told me about this one and how much he loved it. So when I found a copy, I gave it to him after reading it. Oddly, for all the reading I did as a kid, I never read this. I know it’s like the most famous YA ever and all that, but somehow it passed me by. So to start off the […]

Totalitarian Double Murder!

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Because I recently read Invisible Man again and it’s long and draining and pretty much exactly from the same year as this book, I thought I would journal about this book as I am reading for a somewhat different sense of it. Section 1: Pages 1-150: This book starts off with a group of friends bullshitting in the street. As Cross Damon makes away from his group, he starts to feel a deeply encroaching stress and pressure take hold of him. We are subject to this stress […]



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