Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Crime Spree

Skin Deep by Sung J. Woo

The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth and the Case of Two Missing Girls by Jax Miller

Later by Stephen King

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I binged a lot of crime fiction (with one non-fictional exception) as there was a lot of traffic on my already long commute this week, allowing me to synergize eyeball reading with audio. Plus I took off the weekend so I had some extra time… Skin Deep 3 stars So rare, entertaining and enjoyable to have a transracial adoptee as a protagonist. While author Sung J. Woo doesn’t lean too hard on Siobhan’s background, he weaves it in to make her a fully realized person. The […]

Oedipus and Electra

Cropper's Cabin by Jim Thompson

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The year of Jim Thompson continues with what is by far the best book of his I’ve read this calendar year. It may be a cut below his truly greatest works like Pop. 1280 and The Grifters but it’s really darn good. I once heard Jason Concepcion of The Ringer fame compliment Quentin Tarantino by saying that the director “democratizes pop culture.” In other words, he takes B-movie stuff like gangster films and martial arts tales and turns them into high art. Thompson can perhaps be thought of in […]

“Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.”

Wilma’s Way Home: The Life of Wilma Mankiller by Doreen Rappaport

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Wilma’s Way Home: The Life of Wilma Mankiller is more a rating of a 4.5 as I had wanted it to be a bit longer. But as it is a picture book, the length is perfect. It is a longer story to start with as many of Doreen Rappaport’s books are. This is a modern and positive look at one of the leaders in not only Women’s History but Native History as well. Mankiller’s life unfolds on the pages of the book. Linda Kukuk’s illustrations are […]

Crying Out My Safe Word

King Blood by Jim Thompson

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I am an unrequited fan of Jim Thompson’s novels. If he’s not my favorite writer of all time, he’s one of them. I usually read books for good, well-plotted stories with richly developed characters. Rarely do I read them for metaphysics. Such is not the case with Thompson’s work. Famously dubbed the “dimestore Dostoevsky”, Thompson’s unrelenting nihilism and views of the corruption of human nature weirdly fit my own despite my cheery demeanor. I believe we’re all mere steps away from chaos and those who […]

Spoiler: white people are unspeakably awful to Native Americans (Not a spoiler)

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Once again, my favorite podcast Literary Disco delivers with an outstanding book recommendation. I hadn’t heard of this book, but thankfully the wait for it was long at my local library. I say thankfully because I am glad that people are becoming familiar with this gruesome and awesome (in the awe-stricken sense of the word) true story that should mar our nations history, if the people of our nation knew anything about it. And if, um, it wasn’t already super thoroughly marred. The Osage Nation, […]

A book that does what it set out to do.

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I know that’s a very vague title, but it’s weird to call this book great when it’s so tragic. It wasn’t great, but it was effective. I had a very hard time putting it down. It’s the story of the 2013 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, a city that is hit incessantly by tornadoes. They’ve gotten bigger, stronger, and weirder in recent years and no one knows why. The Mercy of the Sky tells the story of the tornado from many different residents’ perspectives, from meteorologists to […]



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