Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Underworld by Don DeLillo

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Underworld exemplifies everything I love and loathe about Don DeLillo. Brilliance, frustration, depth, redundancy. All in 827 mostly readable pages. A book has to be damn good for a reader to put up with it for so long and large stretches of this book are. DeLillo is such a sensory writer; he pens time and memory through sight, smell and touch in such a way as to occasionally leave me breathless. There are passages of this book that will really stick with me. The central conceit […]

Crescent City

A Morning for Flamingos by James Lee Burke

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After being slightly disappointed with Black Cherry Blues, the third David Robicheaux offering from James Lee Burke, I found this a return to form even if it follows a similar formula: drugs, old acquaintances, and every Italian in south Louisiana being involved in the Mafia. What made this one an improvement, and hopefully a pivot to the series, is how Robicheaux develops a relationship with the head mobster in the middle of the maelstrom. Previously, they’ve all been two-dimensional antagonists but this time, he bonds with […]

Charm City’s Worst

We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption in an American City by Justin Fenton

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It’s wild to read this as the trial of Derek Chauvin is going on. I left Baltimore at the end of 2016. Was there for the 2015 Uprising. I know firsthand that the tension which boiled over in April of that year had never really settled. Baltimore has the same social issues and structural inequalities as most American metropolises. It’s over-policed and under-resourced, riddled with a white supremacist power structure that is almost impossible to reform. People demand reform but also want “results” in the […]

Time to Ketchup

Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green

The Revelators by Ace Atkins

The Last Flight by Julie Clark

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Because I read two behemoth 660+ page books back-to-back, I went on a little reading binge this week to “ketchup.” I liked most of these, two more so than the two others. Black Cherry Blues *** I want to go through the David Robicheaux series for two reasons: 1. I love Louisiana and 2. I want to see how Burke develops this story. After enjoying Heaven’s Prisoners, I found this a step back for multiple reasons… 1. Burke pads an already thin story with a lot […]

The Pokes, The City

The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America by Joe Nick Patoski

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Back in February 2020 (aka The Before Times), I visited my in-laws who had moved to the Dallas metro area the previous summer. I had never been to Texas, much less Dallas, so I was excited to see the city. It was…something. Not good or bad, just different. The vibes there were really strange. The weather was weird (somehow hot and cold simultaneously). It felt like someone used hundred dollar bills to paper over cardboard boxes and sterile, charmless buildings. But it still had a […]



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