Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The characters have as much personality and development as chess pieces

The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel by Walter Tevis

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Author Walter Tevis had a knack for writing stories that seem to adapt well to the screen. The Queen’s Gambit, written in 1983, is a current hit series on Netflix, but Tevis, who died in 1984, also penned The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler, and The Color of Money. I have not seen The Queen’s Gambit (or any of the other films) but I can say that the novel reads very much like a screenplay. He gives the reader action and tension on […]

King Her

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shrugged off my manly man view of what real sports are. Cheerleading is a sport. Golf is a sport. Bowling is a sport. And for God’s sake, chess is a sport. I’d rather get sacked by Aaron Donald than try and sit in front of a grandmaster and play them at chess. A few years ago, I read Michael Weinreb’s entertaining The Kings of New York about a chess team at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School. Weinreb, a writer who usually entertains me, […]

Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard.

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

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This is by far my front runner for the best book I will read all year. It’s absolutely fantastic through and through. The premise is pretty simply: Beth Harmon is orphaned when she’s seven, but her life was already one filled with banal forms of trauma like the addiction and break up of her parents, abandonment, and so on. When she’s sent to an orphanage she quickly and easily excels in her schoolwork, but her brain is full of emotional and psychical storms, and so […]



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