Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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In A Hopeless Place

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

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Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: Listicle. “20 Best Crime Novels of 2018” -crimereads.com It’s interesting to me that Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective made CrimeReads.com’s list of 20 best crime novels of 2018 considering how widely panned it was. Many reviewers said some variety of “How can the man who wrote Motherless Brooklyn produce such dreck?” I think such sentiment comes with unfortunately high expectations. I read Motherless Brooklyn earlier this year. It was excellent, definitely one of the best things I read in 2019. And it made me want […]

Where Brooklyn At.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

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I don’t know what it’s like to have Tourette’s Syndrome, nor do I know the specifics of how it manifests in human behavior. As far as I know, neither does Jonathan Lethem. There is a troubling history of able bodied people using illnesses and non-ableness to become magical healers and special problem solvers. So maybe this book is complete trash because Jonathan Lethem gets those aspects wrong. But from an ignorant perspective, I liked this one. And I liked it not because he had Tourette’s […]

The Reason I Won’t Complete the Cannonball This Year

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Either Jonathan Lethem has forgotten how to write or I have forgotten how to read. This book is so incredibly boring and bad it feels like a practical joke. It took me so long to read this book that when I started people still thought Hillary Clinton would be our next president. Even now I have only “finished” by speed-reading the last 80 pages with the result being a complete lack of comprehension. Not that I understood too much of what was happening when I […]



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