Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“Now he carried the past with him rather than being carried on the back of the brute that was his history.”

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

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If you were beginning to sense the onset of dementia and had the chance to take a drug that would clear your mind for a short period of time but then cause your death, would you take it? Ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey doesn’t hesitate when offered the chance because he knows he has something important he is supposed to do before he dies and needs to remember what it is. This short 2010 novel by Walter Mosley is a touching reflection on memory, history and what […]

In which I have to repeatedly recall how to spell labyrinth.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi

A Red Death by Walter Mosley

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan

The Confusions of Young Master Torless by Robert Musil

The Human Comedy by William Saroyan

Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

The Crystal World by JG Ballard

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Labyrinth – 3/5 stars Don’t be fooled by the weird claim on the cover of this book that it’s similar to The Da Vinci Code. It’s not except that this book came out in a time where people were very much trying to capitalize on the success of that novel. The result was some very bad copycats from a novel I love, for how exceedingly silly and dumb it is. I don’t think this novel is among my favorite but it’s so very different from […]

I couldn’t put it down

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

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CBR Bingo: Gateway (favorite genre: Mystery) I love a good mystery, and this is a good mystery. I was surprised, actually, by how much I enjoyed this since typically this kind of hardboiled, seedy-underbelly, protagonist has seen some shit mysteries aren’t the type of mystery I go for. Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is a WWII vet living in LA in the late 40s, down on his luck, who is approached by a man offering a lot of money if Easy can find a woman who’s gone […]

Been There, Doing That Again

Rose Gold by Walter Mosley

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Old Series. The Easy Rawlins series debuted in 1990. As the times change, Walter Mosley has changed his most famous creation with them. He’s also changed his style. I don’t know if it’s for better or worse but I like it. I’ve written on his Leonid McGill series about how Mosley has incorporated some surrealist existentialism into those works and how they felt different to what he had written before. These don’t read like McGill books but they do have […]

I Wonder Indeed

And Sometimes I Wonder About You by Walter Mosley

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I understand that as readers, we bring our own perceptions and biases to books in ways authors do not intend. Such is the exchange between creator and those indulging their creation. I genuinely try to connect with what writers are saying in books despite my own bullcrap. I hate it when readers/reviewers talk about reading or watching something and say “I’m just going to pretend its this instead.” But with Walter Mosley’s Leonid McGill series, I can’t help it. In the early aughts, Mosley turned […]

Sunset Strip

Little Green by Walter Mosley

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One of my all-time favorite movies is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Featuring Elliot Gould in a great star turn as Phillip Marlowe who is deposited in the 1970s as a fish-out-of-water cynical private eye, Altman does a fantastic job of contrasting the post-war male angst of the 50s with the post-60s hypershift in American culture. And oh yeah, there’s a mystery to solve. Chronologically, there’s no gap between Little Green and Cinnamon Kiss, Mosley’s previous Easy Rawlins book. The former picks up a few months after where the latter […]



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