Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Casino by Nicholas Pileggi

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Continuing my rather unexpected trip through books that inspired Martin Scorsese films (I finished I Heard You Paint Houses a week ago), here’s Nicholas Pileggi’s Casino. I was excited to read it because: I watched the movie years ago and remember almost nothing about it. I recently watched Hustlers and people kept comparing it to Casino. I enjoyed Pileggi’s other true crime mafia tale Wiseguy, which was the basis for the movie Goodfellas So I went into this one with a lot of excitement. And it’s…fine. Just fine. Pileggi’s style is much more to […]

Starring Kojak, formerly known as Big Steve, a Very Good Dog

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My blossoming love affair with Stephen King continues, with yet another behemoth of awesomeness: The Stand. This particular edition was released in 1990, twelve years after the first release. It was updated and expanded, and I have no reference to the first edition but, according to “Publisher’s Weekly,” at least as quoted on amazon.com, “The same excellent tale of the walking dude, the chemical warfare weapon called superflu and the confrontation between its survivors has been updated to 1990, so references to Teenage Mutant Ninja […]

A work of Dickensian depth and breadth

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This nearly 800-page novel is a revelation – it is one of the more complex literary works I’ve read in a long time and proved impossible to put down. The Goldfinch tells the story of precocious 13-year-old Theo Decker, who lives alone with his mother in New York City until their unplanned visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the day terrorists decide to blow the museum up. Theo’s mother dies in the disaster, but Theo survives and manages to extricate himself and return […]



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