Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Do You Want to Win the War on Terror, or Not?

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

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When the Cold War ended, a lot of espionage/thriller writers didn’t know what to do with themselves. Tom Clancy, in particular, invented new villains and resurrected old ones for the US to shadowbox with. We were the last remaining superpower and there really wasn’t anything threatening us. And then 9/11 happened. It was like plugging in an electrical socket. Overnight, there emerged a raft of anti-terrorist fiction that both purports to understand Islam (it does not) and/or the Middle East (ditto). It continues today, a […]

Binge

The Blackbird by Richard Stark

Dead Connection by Alafair Burke

The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

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Anytime I finish a tome (in this case, Don DeLillo’s Underworld), I tend to binge read in order to get back in the swing of things. Here are three books I picked up over the weekend… The Blackbird *** Someone asked on Twitter recently that if you could take three traits from a writer for yourself, what would they be? I should have mentioned Donald Westlake’s amazing versatility. Just consider the Grofield series: first a heist tale, then a locked room mystery, now a spy thriller, […]

It’s a real life spy thriller! (And it’s really good!)

The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre

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Oh boy, do I love a good espionage thriller. So, continuing with my “what’s free and available” method of choosing books, I picked up my father’s copy of Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. This is the true story of a high-ranking KGB official who defected to MI6 during the deepest freeze of the Cold War. (KGB is Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti for anyone who plays trivia – it seems like a formidable bonus question). Macintyre interviews […]

The Only Winner Here is Corn.

The Scientist and The Spy by Mara Hvistendahl

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On one hand, I enjoyed reading The Scientist and the Spy, really. Mara Hvistendahl has given us a really compelling account of economic espionage. But Christ, this book is a sticky one. It covers multiple topics I’m interested in: genetics, agriculture, international relations and intellectual property, and politic shit-storms. But it also makes me want to bang my head against the wall while crying out ‘everyone’s a pack of arseholes’ because that was basically the only conclusion I could come to. But with a story […]

A Spy In The Closet

Who Is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht

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Using spy stories to tell larger tales about identity is becoming a popular trope. Most recently, I’m thinking of how Lauren Wilkinson used the genre to talk about black identity against the specter of white imperialism. Rosalie Knecht does it in a different way with a lesbian woman. There are two stories running concurrently with one another: flashbacks to Vera’s time leading up to joining the CIA and her time in Argentina trying to run counterintelligence on KGB factions attempting to facilitate a communist-led coup. […]



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