Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I did not want to know, but since I have come to know…

A Heart So White by Javier Marias

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Sometimes novels have a story and sometimes they are about things, and sometimes both. This is a both novel. I have remember that every time I pick up a Javier Marias novel, especially his older ones, that this will be the case. Our basic set up here is that Juan is a translator for the UN and he’s recently married/about to be married. His father, a secretive man who has been married several times takes up a fascination with Juan’s new marriage (he asks him […]

Let me sit heavy in thy soul

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías

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A man visits a married woman in her flat for a tryst while her husband is abroad. Before anything can happen between them, she suddenly falls ill and dies in his arms. He leaves food on the table for her young son sleeping in the next room, takes the incriminating tape out of the answering machine, and, after trying to contact her husband unsuccessfully, flees the flat. At this point he could just let it be, because no one except the dead woman knows who […]

To make matters worse, the women also dominated all the activity on the upper deck.

Voyage along the Horizon by Javier Marias

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I read three Javier Marias books like year, a trilogy that was published in 2004-2010 or so. I think that Javier Marias is an incredibly readable and interesting and brilliant writer, and his weaving together of a kind of crime novel, spy novel, and cultural critique over the course of 1300 or pages in the Your Face Tomorrow books should put him in contention for the Nobel without question, and that’s not even getting at the dozen or so other novels he’s written. In an interview […]

“You can’t just go around hurting and killing people like that.” “Why not?” asks Tupra.

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I honestly wasn’t sure if I was going to continue reading this series after the first book. It’s one of those book that is incredibly intense, complex, erudite, interesting, audacious, and fantastical in a lot of ways. But it also felt like once I read one of the books, I felt like I had read all three. And in a way, I think I am right. By the end of the third book, some 1250 pages into the whole project, I am not sure what […]

There are some people whose motives don’t deserve further investigation…

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Vol. 1 Fever and Spear I am not sure what to tell you about this one. I was seriously worried when I got started because I bought the first two volumes of this trilogy/long novel because I found the third one for free and didn’t know once I got started if I was going to hack it or not. The opening section of this involves the narrator/protagonist making a series of observations about himself and the world. The first few pages show him watching a […]



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