Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Further Adventures of Eilis Lacey

Long Island by Colm Toibin

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In Long Island, Colm Toibin catches up with Eilis Lacey some twenty years after the events of Brooklyn. As readers will recall, Eilis faced a very tough decision in that novel. Having met and secret married Tony, an Italian-American plumber from a big family, Eilis returned to Ireland to mourn her sister Rose. During that time she reconnected with Jim Farrell, a charming young man preparing to take over his father’s pub. Not knowing of her marriage back in New York, her mother and her […]

May-July Leftovers

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Tripwire by Jack Reacher

Baby Moll by John Farris

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Boyle

The Laundromat: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich

X by Davey Davis

Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship by Harvey Araton

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham

Ex Machina Book Four by Brian K. Vaughan

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite

Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond

That Kind of Danger by Donna Masini

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Spenser Confidential by Ace Atkins

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I usually do these at the end of the month but then I went through a big reading slump March-May. And then I roared back but realized I was behind. So apologies for this being so long. There Will Be Fire **** A good, readable text on a moment in history I knew little about. Even after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, I still had a lot of problem keeping track of all the socio-political dynamics so it’s good that Rory Carroll makes it accessible […]

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 […]

On day Turl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n.

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

Guys and Dolls by Damon Runyan

Wind/Pinball 1973 by Haruki Murakami

The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

The Blood of Elves by Andrej Sapkowski

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins

Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich

Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney

The Prince by Niccola Machiavelli

Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas

The Three Paradoxes by Paul Hornschmeier

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

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The Cyberiad – 3/5 Stars This is a collection of short stories by the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Although it’s a collection, it’s more a series of linked stories almost in the form of a novel. If you’ve read a Stanislaw Lem novel, and I think this is my third, you’ll recognize a cognizant effort to question reality, but also the conventions of science fiction in general. Some of his novels like Solaris are highly metaphysical in nature, while authors, like Pirx the Pilot are […]

The book House of Tribes was better than House of Names

House of Names by Colm Toibin

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I have always had a spot of obsession with the Matter of Troy. Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War was the first adult program I was allowed to stay up and watch. So say connect something to Troy and I am there like white on rice (except I prefer brown rice unless I am making risotto. But brown rice with some butter yum!). So when I heard about this book I had to read it. And then it was like – really, this […]

Snoooooooze.

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Sometimes I read something and I wonder if I have just really missed the point. Such is the case with Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster. Nora Webster takes place in Ireland in the late 1960s, a time of social turmoil and ripe for interesting story-telling. It is the same town in which the heroine of his novel Brooklyn was raised but aside from a quick cameo by her mother, it’s not really a sequel by any means. Nora has recently lost her husband Maurice (to what […]



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