Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Mixed Grill

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Who will Pay Reparations on my Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Necronomicon by HP Lovecraft

Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

The Iliad by Homer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Whores for Gloria by William T Vollmann

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Celebration by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Stony the Road – 5/5 Stars Yet another book that presented answers to questions in part, but mostly added to my reading list, this slight book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. was written to support a documentary and to provide additional resources, analysis, and insight into the post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods in the US. For a more robust understanding of the Reconstruction era, Gates points us to WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, which was one of the first extensive histories […]

A disappointing end to a promising series

The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

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Endings are always difficult. Wrapping up a series based on someone else’s original work, doubly so (a fact all Game of Thrones fans learned the hard way this year). This book concludes Lovegrove’s trilogy of placing Holmes into a Lovecraftian universe and the results are not that great. The fist difficulty is with the source material. Doyle only returned to Holmes reluctantly, and the stories of Holmes towards the end did not have the same energy or enthusiasm as the earlier works. Yes, Lovegrove incorporates […]

Sherlock Holmes Takes on Cthulhu

Sherlock Holmes & the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

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I love Sherlock Holmes and I love the world of horror that HP Lovecraft created. Seeing the two of them brought together was almost irresistible to me but I have seen Holmes placed in a world where logic doesn’t apply before, most notably the collection called shadows over Baker Street. There are aspects of this book that are very reminiscent of some of the best stories in that particular collection.  Where the author is most effective is in trying to really ground homes in this World where […]

Lovecraft, Racism and Disaapointment

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

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I went into this book thinking I would love it. Hoping I would love it. After all, I am a huge Lovecraft fan, in spite of all of the underlying concerns with his tales (for all of his racist and anti-Semitic tropes, as well as a prose so purple it could be smoke on the water, he does present some incredible ideas in his stories). The thought of taking a Lovecraftian universe and exploring it through the eyes of people of color in the 1950s […]

The implacable horror of isolation

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There are books that speak to you. Books that reach down into the core of your inner being to play the delicate chords of your heart strings. Books that stay with you, becoming a passenger for life, indelibly connecting you to a particular place and time, like some kind of existential anchor of permanence in a sea of change. Moby Dick is one such book, for me. That book haunts me. It’s the girl I had a crush on in high school but was too afraid […]



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