Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Tossing in a bunch at once.

The Ice Shirt by William Vollmann

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

The Rip Off by Jim Thompson

On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Why are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer

A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons

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The Ice Shirt – 3/5 Stars I might be Viking-ed out. Between this novel, playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (which is a ton of game), and rewatching the Marvel movies (and with Loki starting up right now) this book was poorly chosen for me to read right now. But it’s a book I’ve been planning to read for 20 years and have failed to a few times, so maybe this is just my reaction to the book. The book is a kind of mixed media novel […]

The Graduate – Charles Webb (1966) et al

The Graduate by Charles Webb

South of Heaven by Jim Thompson

Nothing More than Murder by Jim Thompson

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The Graduate – 4/5 Stars Benjamin Braddock is home from college, en route to grad school in the fall, and experiencing an excruciating cocktail celebration at his parents home. He just can’t seem to tell them that he doesn’t want any of the things he worked for, has no plan for what to do or what this means, and also doesn’t know that he’s about to throw himself into a nice little destructive spiral. He see Mrs Robinson at the party, still pretty attractive for […]

Niccolò Macchiavelli Gump

Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson

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I saw recently Coup de Torchon, a French film starring Isabelle Huppert (had a minimarathon of her films), set in the West Africa in 1938. I got excited and had to go to the source. Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson is set to early 20th century America. Pottsville is in Potts County, “47th largest county in the state” (out of 47). It is a backward place within a backward place, by a river and its sheriff is an unreliable narrator named Nick Corey. His simplistic, […]

The Kill Off (1957) and A Swell Looking Babe (1954) – Jim Thompson

The Kill Off by Jim Thompson

A Swell Looking Babe by Jim Thompson

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A few months ago, I bought up a bunch of Jim Thompson audiobooks at a good price. This left me with way too many Jim Thompson books. I learned over the last couple that I read that they’re not all as intense and disturbing as the first of his I read The Killer Inside Me and Pop 1280, which is good. The Kill Off This is one of the longer Jim Thompson novels, which is funny because he just doesn’t write long novels, clocking at about 250 pages […]

Texas by the Tail (1965) – Jim Thompson

Texas by the Tail by Jim Thompson

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A few months ago, I bought up a bunch of Jim Thompson audiobooks at a good price. This left me with way too many Jim Thompson books. I learned over the last couple that I read that they’re not all as intense and disturbing as the first of his I read The Killer Inside Me and Pop 1280, which is good. Texas by the Tail A con man who can make the dice what he wants to do most times out of ten is working his […]

Carter “Doc” McCoy had left a morning call for six o’clock.

The Getaway by Jim Thompson

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The Getaway – 4/5 Stars If you haven’t read any Jim Thompson before, I think you should, and this might be a solid place to start. Things you generally need to know is that his books tend to be more brutal than you might expect. Plenty of thriller and suspense books don’t “pull punches” but rather than simply not pulling punches, his books follow through on the punches, so there’s often a slight extra layer of brutality worked in. They feel quite a bit more […]



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