Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


In 1969, Rupert Murdoch bought the struggling Sun broadsheet paper and turned it into a number-one bestselling tabloid that would also carry the nickname ‘The Scum.’

Sunburn by James Felton

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This is a book by the mostly online comedian James Felton (I know him solely through Twitter) that details in categorical breakdown the awfulness of the British tabloid The Sun. The book uses 99 headlines and details from other articles to tell the history of the paper owned by Rupert Murdoch. Felton breaks down this history into thematic categories like “celebrity” “racism” and “misogyny” and through light and really funny analysis spells out not only the offense, but also the effect and impact of the […]

Pink, peeling.

Sunburn by Laura Lippman

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Second to latest Laura Lippman novel, and I am starting to think that as much as a like about the Tess Monaghan novels, she’s really better outside of them. This might simply be a case of having read her first five novels versus reading her most recent three though. This novel begins with a man entering a bar in smalltown Delaware and noticing a mid-30s sunburned lady and sidling up to her. From there Laura Lippman slowly unravels this central image telling us that this […]

Allow, if you’re still alive, six to eight years to arrive

Sunburn by Laura Lippman

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There’s something about a noir novel with the word ‘sun’ in its title. It’s coming to me now. Wait. It’s almost there. … Nope, it’s gone now. Anyway. It’s 1994. Two attractive strangers walk into a sleepy Delaware town. She is Polly, a redhead with a sunburn, who has just left her husband and three year old daughter; he is Adam, a PI, looking for a woman once known as Pauline. They meet in the town’s only bar. She finds work as a waitress, he […]

A Novel of Ridiculous Coincidences

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Once more, we’ve got a Fear Street book that doesn’t even take place in Shadyside. The tenuous connection is a character who lives on Fear Street. I’m tempted to go back and count how many Shadyside High students live on Fear Street so far. Too many to make the street’s reputation plausible, I think. We open this time not with a murderer, but with a victim. Claudia Walker wakes up on the beach with her face severely burned, her eyes swollen shut, and her body […]



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