Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Contemplative modern novel

Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn

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This was a pretty quick, humorous read that focuses on modern issues among wealthy people.  Double Blind follows a group of loosely connected people: biologists and best friends Olivia and Lucy, Olivia’s ecologist boyfriend Hunter, and Lucy’s global business boss and boyfriend Hunter. There are others as well, including Catholic officials, dilettante California heiresses, Olivia’s father (adoptive – important point) Martin and his patient Sebastian. The book meanders among a variety of topics in modern life – environmental destruction and attempts to combat it, drug […]

Patrick Melrose

Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn

Bad News by Edward St Aubyn

Some Hope by Edward St Aubyn

Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn

At Last by Edward St Aubyn

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Never Mind We’re asked very soon into this novel to do a few things. One, accept that the novel will take up the space of only a few hours in a weekend getaway of group extremely rich British uppercrust. Two, we’re also asked to sometimes follow the thoughts and wisps of a young boy, the son of the estate-owner. And we’re asked to the deal with the fallout of a tremendously cruel and awful act of sexual violence, all the while the cutting insights of […]

Double Blind and Spook Country

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn

Spook Country by William Gibson

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Double Blind – 2/5 Sometimes I read a book and I wish I listened to the audiobook. Not that I always feel this way, but throughout this book I kept feeling I might give it a better shrift if I had listened to it. Reading it though, I felt my experience of it to be quite anemic and my reaction to the book was lukewarm at the best and slightly antagonistic at worse when it came to to ways in which St Aubyn handled some […]

On the Edge – Edward St Aubyn (1998)

On the Edge by Edward St Aubyn

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There’s a very special kind of American hokum that might be completely unreadable by foreign-born observers. California New Age culture is probably one of them. For one, even to people not from California, there’s something completely bizarre and opaque about it that’s hard to translate even to the Midwest or East Coast. So for a British writer to take a stab at it, especially one not particularly associated with the US (like Christopher Isherwood or Aldous Huxley was) then the job is even harder. The […]

You can change your mind, that’s a what a mind is for.

At Last (Patrick Melrose, #5) by Edward St. Aubyn

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This review isn’t going to do the book justice since I finished it over a month ago. Probably more. I don’t even want to look. One thing I will say right away is that this is one of the few instances where I actually enjoyed the filmed version better than the book. I don’t have any real evidence to back this up since my memory is crap, but all I remember is a feeling that I liked the slight tilt the show put on this […]

My least favorite of the series, but still worth reading, if you liked the first three.

Mother's Milk (Patrick Melrose, #4) by Edward St. Aubyn

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“Did you know,” said Patrick, addressing Seamus again, “that among the caribou herdsmen of Lapland, the top shaman gets to drink the urine of the reindeer that has eaten the magic mushrooms, and his assistant drinks the urine of the top shaman, and so on, all the way down to the lowest of the low who scramble in the snow, pleading for a splash of twelfth-generation caribou piss?” “I didn’t know that,” said Seamus flatly. “I thought it was your special field,” said Patrick, surprised. “Anyhow, […]



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