Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Stranded in Italy or One man’s banishment is someone else’s retirement fantasy.

The Broker by John Grisham

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It’s my first Grisham! Yay! I read this because the majority of the action takes place in Bologna, Italy, a city with which I am enamored. Joel Backman, aka “The Broker”, is a convicted felon. During the last hours of a disastrous presidency, the head of the CIA convinces the Arthur Morgan, the outgoing president, to issue a last-minute pardon for Joel Backman. Backman has been rotting in solitary confinement for six years, with fourteen years remaining on his sentence. The president gives in and […]

“I can’t remember the last murder on Camino Island.” Nat said, “It’s Hoppy Durden. He also does bank robberies.” “I can’t remember the last bank robbery.” “He’s not very busy.”

Camino Winds (Camino Island #2) by John Grisham

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A Time to Kill. Pelican Brief. The Firm. The Client. The Street Lawyer. The Rooster Bar. etc. My reading of John Grisham predates my use of Goodreads so I can’t be sure which I’ve read (as the titles start to blend together) but I have a post from 2016 that said I read “all of his fiction work” so yeah, I am pretty DEEP with Grisham. I’ve found him enjoyable but as the years have gone by a bit less believeable, and a bit more […]

May-July Leftovers

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Tripwire by Jack Reacher

Baby Moll by John Farris

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Boyle

The Laundromat: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich

X by Davey Davis

Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship by Harvey Araton

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham

Ex Machina Book Four by Brian K. Vaughan

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite

Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond

That Kind of Danger by Donna Masini

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Spenser Confidential by Ace Atkins

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I usually do these at the end of the month but then I went through a big reading slump March-May. And then I roared back but realized I was behind. So apologies for this being so long. There Will Be Fire **** A good, readable text on a moment in history I knew little about. Even after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, I still had a lot of problem keeping track of all the socio-political dynamics so it’s good that Rory Carroll makes it accessible […]

The Firm But With Ladies

Please Join Us by Catherine McKenzie

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I was kind of young when The Firm came out with Tom Cruise as the main character but I vaguely remember a secret organization of high powered men pulling strings and using their influence to get what they wanted and uses blackmail as a tactic when members aren’t behaving in the ways they should.  Please Join Us has pretty much the exact same plot. When our main character Nicole finds out that she hasn’t had enough billable hours and that her firm seems to be moving […]

Some Shorts (Evelyn Waugh (1); Italo Calvino (1); Henry James (1); Stephen Graham Jones (1); Cassandra Khaw(1); John Grisham (1); CW Longbottom (1)

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Henry James by A Tragedy of Error

Midnight Caller by Stephen Graham Jones

Don't Turn on the Lights by Cassandra Khaw

The Tumor by John Grisham

Tears of the Anaren by CW Longbottom

Village of Islands by Jim Shepard

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The Loved One “All the day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the west, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean” I rented the first disc of Six Feet Under from Blockbuster just as soon as the dvds of the first season came out. I remember that one of the first scenes of the show, and the first season of the show was weird, like the ways that the first season of Sex […]

End of year 2

The Chamber by John Grisham

The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes

The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud

Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell

Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell

Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell

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Dance to the Music of Time Vol 4 – 4/5 Books Do Furnish a Room This is the 10th (10th!!) book in the series and after the foray in the war, we’re right back where we started: discussing marriages and books in the UK. Specifically, we’re looking into the post-war publishing industry and discussing the state of literature now in 1945 or so. So where are? Well the Moderns (sic) have hung it up and we’ve moved into some other kind of thing that can’t […]



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