Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Snorky

The Confessions of Al Capone by Loren Estleman

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This one is a tough book to pull off. There’s already tons of bs associated with the legend of Al Capone that it’s tough to discern the truth. Fortunately, Loren Estleman, a writer who I’ve been meaning to read for a very long time, gets it well. Estleman’s research is incredible. I read Max Alan Collins’ Scarface and the Untouchable before this so a lot of it was fresh in my head. I figured he (Estleman) might fudge the facts in order to tell a more compelling […]

Some places, you never leave the same

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

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Kicking off my CBR12 Bingo with The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead for the RED book cover square. A beautifully written novel about a segregated Florida reform school during the Jim Crow era. All the boys never left The Nickel Academy the same as when they arrived. The novel flashes between the present and the past through Elwood’s eyes. Each chapter gives you a lyrical moment in time. We learn about the place in pieces, flashing forward to Elwood as an adult. As soon as […]

Timely satire or too soon?

Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

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Have you ever wondered what would happen if a petite, wealthy, elderly Republican woman were killed and eaten by a Burmese python? I hadn’t either until Carl Hiaasen put the idea in my head with his latest book, Squeeze Me. Angela Armstrong is the wildlife wrangler hired to remove a Burmese python from a luxury event location in Palm Beach, Florida. Before she can deliver the python’s corpse to the state, it’s stolen from her apartment. At the same time, word has gotten out that […]

Florida Gothic

This Is Not My Beautiful Life by Victoria Fedden

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I’ve read that the Florida Man archetype is due in large part to police blotters being unrestricted in that state compared to others, but I have to say, it really seems like Florida is the USA’s very own Night Vale. I just reviewed The Orchid Thief and said it was basically Tiger King as written by the New Yorker; this is Tiger King mixed with Say Anything as written by Us Weekly. We find Victoria Fedden eight months pregnant and staying with her mother while […]

I have somehow become a woman who yells.

Florida by Lauren Groff

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CBR 11 – The Collection This is the National Book Award finalist collection by Lauren Groff, the author of Fates and Furies, a book that a lot of people loved and I thought was not good. This collection is better than that novel, but limited in other ways. Part of the reason that I didn’t like Fates and Furies is that there was an inconsistent tone, which had the novel straddling a line between realistic and unrealistic (either would be fine and good) but that […]

Home Improvement

Sideswipe by Charles Willeford

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Alan Sepinwall, my favorite TV critic, has a running gag in his columns where he talks about how he’d like to see a character from whatever show he’s reviewing have a spin-off where they do banal tasks relational to the character’s motives. My personal favorite was the suggestion that goofy Justified gangster Wynn Duffy get a series called Wynnipeg in which he gets continually frustrated at teaching Canadians how to be criminals. At any rate, three books into the Hoke Moseley series and I feel like this one, as well […]



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