Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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 […]

November Odds and Ends

The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake

The Dark Tower by CS Lewis

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk

The Feathers of Death by Simon Raven

The Drowned Cities by Paulo Bacigalupi

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

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The Hot Rock – 3/5 Stars A farcical kind of heist book. John Dortmunder is getting out of prision and his old pal immediately brings him a caper to work on. Together with three other specialists, the friends will be stealing an emerald from a museum that has cultural and sentimental value for two warring African nations. One of the nations currently possesses the emerald, while the other is hiring the thieves. Paid a salary, plus the promise of a large reward, Dortmunder begins to […]

“Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison…”

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

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Thirteen-year-old Madison Spencer–the chubby,  precocious, pampered daughter of two of Hollywood’s brightest stars–discovers one day that she has died (of a marijuana overdose, of all things!) and is now in Hell. Hell, as it turns out, is just as gross as one would expect but significantly more boring. Determined to make the best of it, Madison finds some equally damned friends and begins her quest for something that perhaps resembles meaning? As with all Chuck Palahniuk books, I’m not entirely sure whether I liked it. […]

He leaned forward, his breath the smell of whiskey drunk straight from the bottle.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Congo by Michael Crichton

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This is a reread for both of these books, but it’s also possible I never read Congo — I did see the movie on HBO while babysitting in like 1997 and it’s truly awful. The book is also, not great, but it is a lot better than the movie. Fight Club, of course, I read right after watching the movie. Fight Club – 4/5 Stars This book mostly still holds up. Like the movie, of course, the satire (WHICH IS NOT SUBTLE ACTUALLY) does not […]

Literary Roadkill

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

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Haunted is a series of short stories and poems, loosely related insofar as each is written from the perspective of different member of a group of degenerate sociopaths locked together in a masochistic “Writers’ Retreat”. **trigger warning** this review mentions some extreme and horrific aspects of the book, including miscarriage. The backbone of Haunted that ties each poem and short story together is a horrific three-month-long “Writers’ Retreat”. Each character with a poem and story to tell throughout the novel apparently answered a mysterious advertisement […]

Tony, informed, said: They love funerals.

The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick by Elizabeth Hardwick

We Live In Water by Jess Walter

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

Goodbye Mr. Chips by James Hilton

Lyra's Oxford by Philip Pullman

Elementals by AS Byatt

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New York Stories – 4/5 Stars I read Elizabeth Hardwick’s collected essays earlier this year. I also read her novel Sleepless Nights last year. This is a collection of stories that encompasses about 45-50 years worth of short stories edited and selected by Darryl Pinckney, another novelist and critic who also famously worked with and was friends with Hardwick. I read these stories in a variety of orders, and since they are not part of an intentional collection this blending and mixing up of the […]



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