Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Dinah Lord

CBR14 Participant

Since I let my book blog expire, I want to be more mindful about the books I read again, and maybe get over my hangups about reading romance, by reviewing them. UK-based, she/her.

Dinah Lord's Reviews:

Help! This school is trying to kill me

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

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El (short for Galadriel) is a trying-to-be-good wizard whose powers seem much more designed to go very big and very bad: there’s even a prophecy about her. She’s a pupil at the Scholomance, in her junior year, desperately trying to stay alive through the unusual challenges being a wizard entails, and gain sufficient alliances with her fellow pupils that she’ll (a) be able to graduate (which means getting out alive from the Scholomance), and (b) get a place in a magical enclave, and not have […]

“My father was a king, and the son of kings”, but nothing more

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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Another volume in my Iliad exploration, I missed The Song of Achilles when it first came out in 2012, garnering superlatives and awards, so have come to it rather late. Miller’s book is not a retelling of the Iliad, although she does, of course, deal with its events in the course of the novel, but The Song of Achilles is more concerned with Achilles and his relationship with Patroclus, and fully illuminates the other man as a real person, albeit one who is always in […]

And then there were none – or were there?

Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins

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Lux and her boyfriend Nico are eking out a poorly-paid, uncomfortable living on Maui after their dream of sailing Nico’s boat, Susannah, across the Pacific was smashed due to damage to the boat which they still can’t afford to put right. The situation is rendered more irritating to Lux since Nico’s family is rich, and if he applied for help from them, the boat could be fixed, and they’d be free to travel. Instead, and after Lux is fired from her room cleaning job at […]

Repetitive yet hypnotic, a grand tragedy

The Iliad by Homer

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“The wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfilment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds.” So begins E. V. Rieu’s translation (for Penguin Classics in 1950) of Homer’s Iliad, a prose translation of Greek hexameter verse, telling of the story of an incident, over only a few weeks, in the interminable ten-year Trojan war. We […]

This is why we need FDA regulations!

Bad Blood: Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup by John Carreyrou

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I wasn’t aware of Theranos, the blood testing startup which imploded spectacularly in 2018 from one of the USA’s most-hyped new tech companies to bankruptcy and federal investigation, until Elizabeth Holmes, architect of the whole thing, was actually charged with fraud. The Pajiba commentariat pointed me in the direction of 2018’s Bad Blood (since I’m not a fan of podcasts), and it was well worth the read. Carreyrou, an investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal, first got interested in the story long after Holmes […]

What’s Hecuba to him? or to her?

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

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I devoured Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls just after Christmas, and was pleased to find that the sequel, The Women of Troy, was also available. And so what better way to start my Cannonball read this year (my first ever), than by a review of this fantastic book? You don’t need to have read Silence of the Girls (though you should, because it’s excellent) because Barker reiterates the important stuff which went down in that book which has its impact on this one, […]



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