Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Deep in the Heart of Texas

Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale

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Read as part of CBR11 bingo: First in the Hap and Leonard series. Joe R. Lansdale is one of those writers I’ve always been meaning to get to but never had the time for. His bibliography, while prolific, is not as readily available at the used bookstores I enjoy perusing, nor are many of them at my local library (I had to buy this copy from The Mysterious Bookshop). And when I did try one of his popular ones, The Bottoms, I found it to be too much of a Harper Lee knockoff to finish. But, as said above, when I […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/31/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:69 |

An Homage to an Homage to Twin Peaks?

The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh

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I added The Blinds to my Goodreads list a couple years ago when writer Adam Sternbergh gave an intriguing interview to Texas Monthly magazine. It was all about his travel through Texas to research what West Texas was really like so he could nail it in the book. Since The Blinds was recently a Kindle deal, I nabbed it and gave it a go. At times, the writing is fantastic – fatalistically and pithily humorous. Kind of like a mix of Raymond Chandler and Catch-22. Unfortunately, the back third of the book almost feels like a different writer and story took over. In […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/22/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:26 |

Cowboys Like Us…

The Final Country by James Crumley

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This book inspired the title for the seventh episode of this season’s True Detective. When I finally finished Dave Halberstam’s wonderful-but-exhausting The Best and the Brightest, I decided to pick it up since it was the latest Crumley in my stack. And it might be my favorite. I’ve always liked the Milo books more than the Sughrue ones. There’s really no difference between the two characters; they’re both old, gruff alky war vets who function as ancillaries for the author. But for whatever reason, the three Milo books (I have yet to read the third Sughrue one) tend to be more streamlined and […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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2/26/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:22 |

Caught out in the rain in the most dangerous Magic Tree House mission yet!

Hurricane Heroes in Texas #30 by Mary Pope Osborne

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By my count, this is number 16 in my bingo journey and The Last in a Series! The Magic Treehouse series is an interesting one. Ever since I have heard about it, I wanted to read one. However, I have only read some of the non-fiction companions to the fiction stories and some of her non-Treehouse books. When the read the last in a series came up on the bingo board, I figured why not? Well, the problem is, there are series within the series! There is the main story, the Merlin series and a couple others, plus the non-fiction […]

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9/13/2018 's CBR10 Review No:354 |

Texas noir. #CBRBingo

Bluebird, Bluebird (Highway 59, #1) by Attica Locke

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Project: Catch Up On Review Backlog commences. No promises on the quality of my next ten or so reviews. I just want to get them done. (This will probably unfortunately result in subpar reviews for books that deserve much better.) Let’s start with a book I finished over a month ago, Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke. First things first, this book was incredibly well done. It’s a crime book set in Texas, featuring a black Texas Ranger as its protagonist. I knew that going in. I also knew that the author had previously said that her books were “too black […]

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8/2/2018 's CBR10 Review No:88 |

She had me at Dolly Parton.

Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

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Dumplin’, whose real name is Willowdean, is a smart, kind, capable, funny, and fat (her term) 16-year-old in small-town Texas. Being sixteen is sucky enough, am I right?!, but the “fat” part causes even more trouble than one would expect for Dumplin’ since her mom is the local pageant queen-turned-pageant director, still living on her own pageant days, staying thin to fit in a 30-year-old dress. She was herself once Miss Teen Blue Bonnet and you better believe that’s a big effin’ deal in Clover City. Dumplin’ is pretty bad-ass — she takes her mom in stride for the most […]

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2/12/2018 's CBR10 Review No:4 |

The Unknown Story of America’s First Serial Killer

The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth

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Before Jack the Ripper, there was The Midnight Assassin. He was a serial killer in Austin, Texas, and maybe the first serial killer. He sometimes simply scared women by standing in front of a window, sometimes beat women and went through their clothes, and sometimes killed them. His weapons of choice were iron rods inserted in the ears, an axe swung at the face, and a brick. In the mid-1880s he killed at least five women in Austin, totally changing the mood and even the landscape of Texas’ little capitol city. People won and lost their livelihoods and their freedom […]

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12/11/2017 's CBR9 Review No:65 |

The stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas!

Lone Star: A History Of Texas And The Texans by T.R. Fehrenbach

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When famed Texas historian T.R. Fehrenback died a few years ago, Texas Monthly eulogized the man and offered some early insight on his legacy and the book that made him famous – Lone Star: What makes Fehrenbach a great historian? The answer is that he is a great writer. He has a story to tell. Lone Star is indeed an epic. It is a work that covers not just chapters but centuries. On its pages we encounter generations of men who came to Texas to subdue a harsh land. Some succeeded; others could not take the measure of the land, and […]

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12/3/2016 's CBR8 Review No:34 |


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