I read All Over But the Shoutin’ on the recommendation of another Cannonballer, and agree wholeheartedly with his/her review: the beginning of the book fascinated me, and Rick Bragg is kind of a dick. “One: Don’t kill yourself. Two: Don’t kill each other. Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain’t fam’ly.” Like many other memoirs I’ve read, Rick Bragg was raised by a hard working saint of a mother while his asshole father flitted in and […]
Cannonbaaaaaalllll
Yay, I hit my cannonball! “I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.” So this was the second Flavia de Luce mystery. This one had some pretty depressing elements, as it revolves primarily around a dead child and a beaten woman. But Flavia brings her humor to it, and the twisty mystery part was pretty good. When a van breaks down […]
“Those of us who are going to live,” Dinah said, “have to start living by our own lights.”
One the one hand, I think it’s commendable that Neal Stephenson didn’t break Seveneves into three (or more) novels, which he easily could have done, and stretched their publications out over a decade or so. On the other hand — doing so may have lead to more enjoyment (at least for me) of the series, as the first two sections kept me enthralled, while the third tended to drag. By the end, I felt like I’d spent so much time in “section three” that I’d practically […]
The Dodds in Berlin
I am trying so hard to hit my cannonball before I leave town on Saturday, since I know I’ll finish several books on my trip but won’t have internet access to post my reviews. Unfortunately, Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts took me a full week to finish due to its dense subject material and rather dry writing. “Like most people, I acquired my initial sense of the era from books and photographs that left me with the impression that the world of then had no […]