Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Corona Days

Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese

Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost

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After two-plus years of successfully evading the coronavirus, it finally caught up to me last week. Fortunately, my symptoms were mild (vaccinated and boosted), the only one lingering was fatigue. That and family responsibilities left me little time to write reviews this past week. So I decided to put these three here instead of my monthly dump because they were all worthy of longer reviews, two good, one damn fine. Honor Thy Father **** One of the things that made The Sopranos such an excellent television […]

Paranoia! Paranoia! Everybody’s Coming to Get Me!

Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America by William Jacobson

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A few weeks after the, shall we say, contentious 2016 primary, a former friend who I still somewhat interacted with on Facebook (and who was and maybe still is a dyed-in-the-wool Way Too Online Libertarian) started blasting me in the comment section of some post I made. He accused me of supporting weird, horrific stuff that made no sense just because I voted for Hillary Clinton. Not being a patron of the Conservative Reddit Extended Universe, I had no idea what he was referring to. […]

You Are Not Alone: Let the women do the work!

You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen

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This one was interesting! Like many novels of this type, the chapters alternate between different perspectives, letting the reader in on the underlying plot.  Shay Miller witnesses an apparent suicide in the subway in New York one day. She’s lost her job and is generally feeling lost, and one day she sees a woman jump in front of a train. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know anything about the woman, but there is something familiar about her…  This leads Shay to spend her days […]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the (reading) Weekend…

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg John-Barker, Julia Scheele (illustration)

Widespread Panic by James Ellroy

Quarry's Cut by Max Allan Collins

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Read a variety of books close to and over the weekend. Let’s check it out… Bleeding Edge **** This is a 2021 reread and it’s better than I remember. The ending disappoints but it’s still an entertaining, prescient novel. Pynchon warned us about Too Online culture and yet, here we are.   Times Square Red, Times Square Blue **** I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this. And I liked it! Mostly. This is like a tale of two books. It’s two essays […]

Questions, questions, questions

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill

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The Manson Family murders loom large in the annals of crime history, with prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book Helter Skelter laying out the official story that’s long been accepted as fact by the general public. This book basically kicks Helter Skelter into a fire, but while the cover of mine says it reveals the truth behind the murders, what it actually does is raise lots and lots of questions. Chaos isn’t really even about the murders. Instead, it’s the story of Tom O’Neill’s decades long obsession […]

“That which does not kill us,” I said, “has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.”

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

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Peter Grant and his partner of sorts, Lesley May, have to do a lot of explaining themselves. Not just their actions as members of The Folly, the (tiny) branch of the London Met that deals with “unusual circumstances”, but also every reference that they make about the modern world. Why is that? They’re making these references to The Nightingale; their commanding officer who has been fighting the bad guys (thieves, murderers, Nazis) since before WWII. Before WWII? But how? Well, Nightingale stopped aging in the […]



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