Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran

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Unlike Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I wasn’t able to down this one quickly like I thought I would. I had to sit with certain parts of it. It’s more personal and raw than the first one…and just as good, if not better. It’s tough to describe Gran’s writing style. It’s this mix of absurdism, postmodernism and hardboiled. Usually, people who write that way are trying way too hard. For Gran, it’s effortless. And it makes every dialogue exchange an adventure. Sometimes, I […]

Ladies of the Canyons flashback

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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  What a blast from the past.  Spoiler alert, Daisy Jones and I am the same age, and living the 1970’s LA life whilst in your twenties was some good times.  The music was all around, in an LA-centric way I have not seen since.  (Still here.)  The clubs were rocking, but I did not have that kind of money, although the boyfriend and I managed to swing tickets once for the Universal Amphitheater and Linda Ronstadt in all her boy scout uniform glory (damn, […]

A Twofer

The Night and the Music by Lawrence Block

Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner

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I knocked out two books over the weekend, both good enough in their own ways.   The Night and the Music 4 stars I’ve never really liked short stories but I like Matthew Scudder and, aside from a novella, this is all that I have left to get from his tale. And I enjoyed each story on its own in some way. The mystery ones were fun but the ones where we see Scudder’s humanity are often better. I do wish the Mick Ballou ones were longer […]

A Composition of Decomposition

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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Last time you, me, and the other Caitlin who spells her name correctly met up, I was asking about what you wanted to happen to your body when you died. Remember?  A good time was had by all. This time I am not going to ask what you want to happen, because while Smoke Gets in Your Eyes does talk about what one can choose for their post-mortem adventures, it also gives a breakdown (cymbal crash) of what happens to a human body when it stops being […]

Frank was great, the rest, shrug

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

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I was looking for an audiobook for my beast of a commute to work (an hour/hour 15 each way) and checked for an audie award winner and this one won for best female narrator and that was good enough for me! I knew diddly about it, but figured it would be something to pass the time, and to that end, I was correct. Well-written, interesting, and filled with fun characters it had all the markings of a good novel but I didn’t like some of […]

Wave After Wave, Slowly Drifting…

The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow

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A few days ago, I read Martin Scorsese’s interview reflecting on The Irishman and his career in general. A small tidbit in the interview was that he and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro had passed on adapting The Winter of Frankie Machine in the aughts. De Niro read it and liked it, almost as much as he did I Heard You Paint Houses, which was adapted into The Irishman.  The Irishman was one of the better movies I saw in 2019. I’m a big Martin Scorsese fan. When I read that […]



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