Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About vel veeter

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vel veeter's Reviews:

How to Read Poetry like a Professor

How to Read Poetry like a Professor by Thomas C Foster

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I’ve been reading Thomas Foster’s “How to Read…” series in preparation for teaching AP this fall. This volume is probably the technical of the books, and not the least enjoyable by any stretch, but the least playful. It’s also the book that I probably most need since like Thomas Foster mentions repeatedly I both fit the English major and English grad student as well as the English teacher who skirted by having not read nearly as much poetry as I should have been forced to […]

Grab Bag

In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff

Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka

Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

The Collected Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece Pancake

Child of God by Cormac Mccarthy

Candide by Voltaire

A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman

On Animals by Susan Orlean

The Facts by Philip Roth

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In Pharoah’s Army -4/5 The second memoir by Tobias Wolff (known for A Boy’s Life too) but covering his time in Vietnam. This memoir reads a lot like a Vietnam novel — faint with memories, covering topics, and episodic. It’s hard not to compare it to Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried (a “novel”) and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship me Home (a memoir). In those two books Tim O’Brien likes to hide. There’s a few moments where […]

Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said

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In Orientalism, Said looks at the cultural and historical forces that built the Western understanding of the Near East, focusing heavily on the 18th century and probably most emblematically in the histories of Napoleon’s conquests in Egypt. He especially focuses on the idea of a “textual attitude”, where one’s concept of something is entirely built through reading about it (or in contemporary version reading about it online or seeing film and tv about it) as the primary way that people understood the Near East. In […]

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

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The other day (it’s 2022 by the way) a Republican candidate for office thanked Donald Trump for protecting “white life” and the crowd cheered. Her campaign later said she meant the “right to life” but sometimes you say what you mean, instead of saying what you meant to say. It happens. In rereading The Handmaid’s Tale, I am struck again by how profoundly dishonest Conservatives are. They are trying to preserve white life, and always have been, but they will just lie to your face […]

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

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You are about to read Vel Veeter’s review of Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, when you notice that Vel Veeter has begun their review of the novel in the same style of the opening of the novel. The novel begins with a second-person narrator telling you that you are reading the new novel. As you make your way into the novel, having purchased it, and the novel gets a little subjunctive here by not allowing you to skim the […]

Theophilus North and The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Theophilus North by Thornton Wilder

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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Theophilus North – 4/5 Stars This last novel of Wilder’ was written in the 1970s, when he was also in his 70s and would die a few years after. The vantage point of the novel is from about the 1970s, but involves a young man who went to Yale (Wilder went to Yale when he was a young) who gets a leave of absence from his job as a Latin and French tutor at a private boys school and moves to Newport, Rhode Island to […]



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