Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

After two miles of walking, he came to a town.

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

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This is another Walter Tevis one and the second most famous story he wrote behind The Hustler as this is the basis of the Nicholas Roeg movie starring David Bowie from the 1970s. This novel begins in Kentucky in 1980 or so as TJ Newton, our eponymous man, walking into a pawn shop and talking himself in $60 for a gold ring he authenticates, only to later show that he has dozens more just like it. He takes this early win into his next move, creating […]

Where it faced the highway, the Sunburst was just another motel, but behind the main building sat a cluster of a half-dozen concrete cottages with with tiny rock garden.

The Color of Money by Walter Tevis

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The last of the crop of Walter Tevis books I have direct access to in audiobook form. This is a sequel to the first novel The Hustler and the book that the sequel to that film is based on. I don’t recall a lot of the Martin Scorsese movie and maybe it’s good, but the changes that he made as filmmaker are so incredibly boring compared to how very very good this book is. It far surpasses the first book, really gets at the heart of […]

Walking up Fifth Avenue at night, Spofforth begins to whistle.

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

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This is the novel that got me on my recent kick for Walter Tevis in the first place. I was looking up books that won or were nominated for the big sci fi awards, and this was was nominated for one of them. Then I saw that he had written The Hustler, so that opened up more, and then Hoopla had several of his books available, so here I am. This is a science fiction book more or less, but is more so written as a […]

Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard.

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

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This is by far my front runner for the best book I will read all year. It’s absolutely fantastic through and through. The premise is pretty simply: Beth Harmon is orphaned when she’s seven, but her life was already one filled with banal forms of trauma like the addiction and break up of her parents, abandonment, and so on. When she’s sent to an orphanage she quickly and easily excels in her schoolwork, but her brain is full of emotional and psychical storms, and so […]

Henry, black and stooped, unlocked the door with a key on a large metal ring.

The Hustler by Walter Tevis

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This is the novel that the Paul Newman/George C Scott/Jackie Gleason movie from 1961, and the same author of the sequel, The Color of Money starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. I picked this up in part because it was available from my library as an audiobook, but also because two other Walter Tevis novels, which I also plan to read soon, Mockingbird and The Queen’s Gambit, the second of which my wife got from the library completely out of the blue, and the first being on […]



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