Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Elder LOTR/Holmes fan girl/writer since forever.

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Sigh. This Could Have Been More.

My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues by Pamela Paul

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I’m sure it won’t come as a shock to anyone here on Goodreads/Cannonball that many of us love to keep track, one way or another, of what we read, not to mention write about it.  So I was expecting a bit more, I must say.  Bob (or Book of Books), is a dated list of what Paul has read.  But that is literally it.  No authors’ names, no plot summaries, no ratings, no impressions, no thoughts of any kind about each book.  Sure, there a […]

Not My Flavor

The Flanders Road by Claude Simon

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OK, let me just put this out there. Unconstructed prose is not my jam. Page after page with no structure, no punctuation, no paragraphs, OK, no. Looking at you James Joyce. Dubliners? Love. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man? Well OK. Finnigan’s Wake? OK, now we having issues. Ulysses? Oooohhh no. So I feel guilty about not giving this a better rating because it is not my cup of tea, but I suspect it is well written. Generally when I give a 1 […]

You Don’t Always Get What You Want

On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks

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Alas, this was not the Green Dolphin I was looking for.  There is a jazz standard by this name that I love, and I know it was featured in a movie, based on a novel of the same name.  Well, almost the same name.  What I was looking for was Green Dolphin Street, based on an historical novel set in New Zealand.  So imagine my surprise when I pick up the book I had ordered from the library, and see the cover featuring a mid-century […]

Romeo and Juliet, California Style

Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson

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There were two old school romances I adored as a teen.  One, reread not too long ago, was Lorna Doone.  And the other was, spoiler, Ramona.  As a SoCal girl, how could I not?  I was very familiar with the locations and history.  As a matter of fact, one of my sons got married at the Rancho Camulos, where the story begins.  It’s a historical site, but since it was owned by the same family until the mid-20th century, it’s a perfect hodge-podge of various […]

Been sleeping on this guy. Even Madonna beat me to it.

Gold by Rumi

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A great first meeting story.  The year was 1244, when Rumi met Shams in a bazaar in Konya, Persia.  Rumi was a young scholar, and Shams, about twenty years older, was a wandering free thinker.  They got to discussing literature, and Shams challenged Rumi to find his own voice.  Over the course of two years of traveling together, Rumi did just that, and produced sixty five thousand some verses.  This book samples that work. I first ran into his name whilst reading a book on […]

Alas, Not As Fun As the Last One, Still Can’t Go Wrong with PM.

The Case of the Crooked Candle by Earle Stanley Gardner

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Quick question for any of you nautical types out there.  You can see from the title that a key clue involves a candle.  Said candle has been burning in an interior cabin on a small yacht, completely unattended for a period of time.  Is this a thing, even in the 1940s?  Seriously, Gardner?  Aren’t those vessels infamously, well, woody?  SMH. OK, aside from blatant safety violations, this case had to do with a lot of trotting back and forth along the Ventura coastline, with the […]



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