Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Towards the end of my first time in Indonesia I stayed in a house on the edge of the jungle and dreamed the worst nightmares I have known since I was a child.”

In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos by Richard Lloyd Parry

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CBR15Bingo: Asia & Oceania (all about Indonesia and experiencing the uprising that unseated Suharto) I picked this up because I loved The People Who Eat Darkness, Parry’s later work about trying to catch a murderer in Japan. It is such a great book that I’ve been wanting to read other work by him, so I was happy to find out that he’d written this part memoir, part on the spot reporting about the time he’d spent in Indonesia as a young journalist. I didn’t know […]

Can’t think of a title, too excited to announce Bingo #10,11, & 12 – Black Out!

Transmetropolitan volume 2: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis (author), Darick Robertson (penciller), Kim Demulder (inker), Rodney Ramos (inker), Nathan Eyring (colorist), Clem Robbins (letterer)

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CBR14 Bingo: “Bird” – Because there are birds on the cover and Spider Jerusalem figuratively flips the bird to the world on the regular. Warren Ellis’ “Transmetropolitan” comic series is set in a not terribly distant, messy, chaotic future (far from any idea of a future utopia) with one lone journalist intent on telling the truth, Spider Jerusalem.  As described by a friend, he is “a dirty bastard and a moral vacuum, but you couldn’t have a better friend.”  Through Spider, Ellis gives a blistering […]

Why is this Man Mad?

Understudy for Death by Charles Willeford

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Read as part of CBR14Bingo: font. The book is told from the perspective of a journalist. Several times throughout the novel, the font of the novel will change when an article that the journalist or someone else writes is inserted in the story.  It’s going to be tough to squeeze 250 words out of here but I’ll try. I was planning on dumping this with my end-of-the-month reads but it checked the “font” box off CBR Bingo so… Charles Willeford loves writing about domesticity. And while he’s […]

A Fun Romance/Mystery, Perfect for the Beach or the Airport

Hello, Summer by Mary Kay Andrews

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I am someone who is very sensitive to the formatting and trim size of a novel, so I think a lot of my enjoyment in this novel was partially related to how much I liked the mass market formatting they used. A couple of years ago a lot of publishing companies switched to this taller, skinnier format that doesn’t work well with my hands, but the edition I got at the airport of this book was a more squat square format that was perfect. And […]

I Read All About It

The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff

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This book read like one Bond villain describing the machinations of another Bond villain with relish and glee. I read the first and last of Michael Wolff’s Trump books coming away unimpressed. Wolff gets the hot gossip, such as it is, by being an unrepentant jock sniffer but that’s all these books are: gossip. I never thought I’d read him again but as I’ve cast around for books on Rupert Murdoch in light of my love of the tv show Succession, this one kept coming up […]

In A Foreign Field

Missionaries by Phil Klay

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I usually enjoy former President Barack Obama’s recommended reading lists but, after reading Missionaries, I confess that its presence on his list kind of bugs me. This book is, among other things, a strong handed critique of borderless imperial war and I think it takes a certain kind of cynicism to set that aside and appreciate it solely on its literary value. Because, damn, this book is cynical. How could it not be? Frankly, I knew little about Colombia until reading it. I knew Simón Bolivar liberated it […]



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