Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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A Novel About Race, Identity, and Satire

Erasure by Percival Everett

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I learned about this novel when the movie American Fiction came out (which I’m hoping to see this weekend). It’s striking and sad how relevant this 23-year-old book still is when it comes to race and racial stereotypes. Percival Everett provides a sharp critique of race. It’s biting and funny and depressing and tragic. Told through journal entries, it follows Thelonious (Monk) Ellison during a time when he is facing dramatic changes in his family and has chosen to write a book intended to be […]

C I Yikes

Libra by Don DeLillo

Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer

The Ghost by Robert Harris

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Recently, I read three different books featuring CIA chicanery (two were fictional). This was unintentional but I figured since the themes were similar, I’d just batch review them rather than do individual ones. Libra***** This was a re-read. I liked it the first time. I loved it now that I: a. had a better since of the Oswald timeline after reading Posner’s Case Closed and b. could appreciate the meta-narrative structure in a way I couldn’t before. This is the only DeLillo book I can really […]

April 2024 Leftovers

X = : Poems by Stephen Berg

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

A Game of Lies by Clare Mackintosh

The Hurricane Blonde by Halley Sutton

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais

Watch It Burn by Kristen Bird

Sleep With Strangers by Dolores Hitchens

The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn by Josh Young

One of Us Is Wrong by Sam Holt

The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker

The Second Murderer by Denise Mina

Blackmailer by George Axelrod

The Darkest Glare: A Story of Murder, Blackmail, and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles by Chip Jacobs

Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith

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Happy April, y’all! X = : Poems**** This is why library book bingos are necessary. I only checked this one out because I needed to read a book of poems and I wanted to check the nettlesome “X” off the A-Z reading list. A convoluted reason to begin with and this wasn’t even the book I thought I was getting! I thought I’d get a different X by a different author. I’m glad I got this one. Some of these really spoke to me, including […]

“change the dedication / from revolution to revelation”

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl

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At some point as a student I came across French theorist Roland Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), which suggests (in translation) that a text ought to be read as a “tissue of quotations” (instead of a single isolated product of a clearly identifiable authorial intention; I paraphrase and summarise wildly here). I vaguely thought of “tissue” initially as the kind of tissue you’d sneeze into, woven to be flimsy and fragile and disposable. Later, I thought of “tissue” as in the weavings of […]

Extra Reading

Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

Players by Don DeLillo

A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke

Louise Hathcock: Queen of the State Line Mob by Robert Broughton

Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark

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I’m trying to document all of the books I read on here to better hit my cannonball numbers. These are ones I’ve been meaning to upload into combined reviews but haven’t. Some are good, some are eh, but most of them just didn’t merit a lot of words from me at the time I finished them for various reasons. Who Is Maud Dixon? *** For a similar identity-based thriller I read last year, a reviewer derisively pegged it as The Talented Mr. Rip-off. I didn’t […]

That is the hardest I have ever had to work to read fiction

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Do not start this book if you are looking for a light, fun read. Do not start this book if all you want to do while reading is scan a page and flip the page. Do not start this book if you are uncomfortable with feelings of unexplainable dread. House of Leaves is not an easy read. It took me a full two weeks to finish reading. Not only are there footnotes and footnotes that have footnotes, but the way the words are typed on […]



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