Cannonball Read 15

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Himes

Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes

Blind Man with a Pistol by Chester Himes

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Cotton Comes to Harlem 4/5 I am sometimes a little lukewarm about this series, but this one is great. Usually what I like about the series is that it wastes no time jumping into the action, especially offering up some crazy action right from the start. My favorite of the books really pull that off. Here we begin with a closed gate event in a parking lot where a minister (a grifter we know from a previous book) is selling people on a one-way trip […]

Longs and Shorts

The Big Book of Reel Murders by Ed. Otto Penzler

My Head! My Head! by Robert Graves

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Heart by Jade Anouka

Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch

The Ophelia Network by Mur Lafferty

Deep Hole by Don Winslow

Legal Immigrant by Alan Cumming

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

The Cube by Adam Rapp

Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Pale Sister by Colm Toibin

Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The Big Book of Reel Murders – Edited by Otto Penzler – 4/5 The concept of this collection is still mostly pulpy stories (though with some other older stories and more contemporary stories not really pulpy) that were made into films. It should really be called “Reel Crimes” as not every story involves a murder, but the concept mostly works. It ends up being a little frayed throughout as apparently it’s just much easier to get some rights to stories than others, so like the […]

Thanksgiving Short Books

The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nahisi Coates

Buck by MK Asante

Yellow-Back Radio Brokedown by Ishmael Reed

Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara

The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes

The Double Helix by James Watson

Pafko at the Wall by Don Delillo

Williwaw by Gore Vidal

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

The Mahe Circle by Georges Simenon

The Hand by Georges Simenon

The Engagement by Georges Simenon

Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The Promise by Damon Galgut

Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk

Gerald's Party by Robert Coover

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The Beautiful Struggle – 5/5  Stars I never taught in Baltimore City, but I did teach in Baltimore County, where Ta-Nehisi Coates spends part of high school. (I was two schools over, but the idea was pretty much the same there). So the result is some familiarity here. If I ever met Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think what I would want to tell him is when I was brand new to Baltimore, so when I scheduled my meeting with the MVA (DMV) I went to the […]

I dreamed a fellow asked me if I wanted a dog and I said yeah, I’d like to have a dog…

If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes

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Chester Himes is primarily known for his crime novels and I bet if you’ve never heard of him, you have heard of A Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes to Harlem, but he also wrote Blind Man with a Pistol, and The Real Cool Killers. I am not a huge fan of that crime fiction, but I do think this book is good. I decided to finally read this one after it was referenced in the collected Ralph Ellison letters. Ellison thinks this novel is quite strong, but is disappointed […]

Hank counted the stack of money.

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes

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This is short crime novel by Chester Himes. This is among his most famous, if not his most famous. I’d previously read another from this series called The Real Cool Killers, that I remember liking, but don’t remember much of the specifics of that book. I did like this one–it’s got a strong and curious voice–and there’s a great wildness to this book. It’s chaotic from the very beginning, involving a money laundering scheme, a pile of cash, two violent detectives, and a lot of shooting. […]



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