Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Elder LOTR/Holmes fan girl/writer since forever. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: elderberrywine's Quick Questions interview.)

elderberrywine's Reviews:

Witch Hunt!

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

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The mix of modern crime procedurals and the deep stupidity of superstition just didn’t click for me. Katherina Kepler is a war widow (or at least she assumes so, since her husband never came back), and one of her sons is Johannes Kepler, authority on the newly discovered revolutionary laws of planetary motion.  She herself happens to be an authority on herbal remedies, but not everyone in the village has confidence in her treatments.  The random cow has a bad spell, and apparently at some […]

Wankers vs Berks, and Other Things I Totally Did Not Know

Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life by Harry Mount

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True confession: back in the dim dark days of my English classes, I do not remember ever running into verb conjugation.  Tenses- past, present, and future – absolutely.  And I could diagram a sentence a treat.  But otherwise, you would just go with what sounded right (and it was helpful if you read a lot), but you mean there are rules?  Pfft.  This is English. I first ran into verb conjugation when I took up Spanish.  Spanish is such a reasonable language.  No silent letters […]

Manly Men Doing Manly Things

The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte

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It didn’t take too long for me to realize who this author reminded me of.  Not particularly his style, but more his content.  Hemingway.  Coming from me, that is not a complement. Faulques is a professional photographer who specializes in the battlefield.  In Serbia, he photographs a young Croatian fighter, Markovik, and the picture wins a prestigious award, and is also published widely.  Unfortunately, it also makes Markovik himself famous, and his wife and child are killed.  Thus, he is searching for Faulques.  Meanwhile, Faulques […]

Life in Africa, But Probably Not at All What You Are Thinking Of

A Girl Is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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There was something about the writing of this account of growing up female in 1970s – 80s Uganda that struck me as different but I couldn’t quite place it.  And then I read an interview with the author wherein she explained that as an African writer writing in English, you have a choice.  Are you writing for an English-speaking audience, for whom explanations may be needed, or are you writing for your people?  Makumbi chose the latter, and the book becomes all the much richer […]

Yes, I Would Like to Move to This Village, Thank You

Little Snow Landscape by Robert Walser

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Cannonball Bingo – Landscape Robert Walser was a Swiss writer of miniatures, with works dating from 1905 to 1933.  As the title indicates, his earlier pieces are primarily short descriptions of the villages and forests of his youth.  And the man loved to walk.  “The Moon” describes a night stroll as he leaves his village and its Christmas market and climbs up into the forests and mountains.  I wished I could stand in the moonlit night forever and surrender to old dear thoughts, to stay […]

When You’re Too Hard Core for Raymond Chandler

Fast One by Paul Cain

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Bingo square – People This noir classic was created when Paul Cain patched together five stories that he had written for the detective magazine Black Mask.  Published in 1933, it soon became famous as the book that was just too hardboiled to be fashioned into a movie.  And seriously, it is, even by today’s standards.  Daaaaamn son. Paul Cain was by then a slippery character in Hollywood.  That was not his real name, nobody was quite sure where he was from (spoiler, Iowa, actually), and […]



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