Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Storm Front by Jim Butcher

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Have you ever been approached by a grim-looking man, carrying a naked sword with a blade about ten miles long in his hand, in the middle of the night beneath the stars on the shores of Lake Michigan? Until very recently my answer was a “definitely not”. Now, thanks to crystalclear for sending this book my way during the 2020 Book Exchange, my answer has changed: YES! By proxy, at least. I have been acquainted with the big swordy fella and many other weirds that […]

Snorky

The Confessions of Al Capone by Loren Estleman

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This one is a tough book to pull off. There’s already tons of bs associated with the legend of Al Capone that it’s tough to discern the truth. Fortunately, Loren Estleman, a writer who I’ve been meaning to read for a very long time, gets it well. Estleman’s research is incredible. I read Max Alan Collins’ Scarface and the Untouchable before this so a lot of it was fresh in my head. I figured he (Estleman) might fudge the facts in order to tell a more compelling […]

Reading, Reading, Reading

Broken Places by Tracy Clark

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

Solos by Kitty Burns Florey

The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton

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Finishing off the year right with another round of great crime fiction… Broken Places 4 stars A really good debut novel that’s pure Chicago without being annoying. A little predictable towards the end but well-written nonetheless. Also, much love for featuring black Roman Catholicism, which is a different expression than the commonly mass produced (re:white) Roman Catholicism of crime novels and movies.   The A.B.C. Murders 4 stars This one was about to highlight why I’m not a big Christie fan, despite usually enjoying her novels. Whereas […]

The Chicago Way

Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago by Max Alan Collins

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I’ve been waiting for this book for years. There are so many works out there about Al Capone, most of them more fact than fiction, few of them recounting the gritty details of his battles with Eliot Ness during Prohibition. The Untouchables movie is more fantasy than reality, so was the TV show, depicting a Manicheean struggle between good and evil, law and order, etc. I wanted something that covered the full details of how these two met on the playing field of Chicago and what actually […]

cbr12bingo – Adaptation!

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

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It is 1954, and a young man named Atticus is headed home to Chicago. In Chicago he will find his beloved uncle and aunt, who together run The Safe Negro Travel Guide and Travel Agency. His uncle, like himself, is a lover of pulp novels and dime store comics. His aunt travels the country alone, adding stops to the travel guide while looking at the stars. He’ll find his little cousin, a comic-book hound and talented artist. He’ll find his old friend Titia, who has […]

“I look for something else I could do for work but feel unqualified for everything interesting and repulsed by everything else.”

The New Me by Halle Butler

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This very moment was the correct time for me to charge through this nasty (a compliment!) little slice of life. There was a time, not too long ago, that the crippling desperation of Millie would have felt far too familiar. There is a lot of Hannah Horvath (Girls) in Millie, and I found Girls very hard to stomach when I too was young, squandering privilege, and living like a recluse outside of my seriously uninspiring job. “Everyone thinks deep in their hearts (at least when they’re young, […]



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