Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About Moonlight Reader

CBR11 participant

Cannonball Read 11 is my first foray into cannonballing. This year I am working my way through A Century of Women, which means that you'll get lots of reviews of books by women written between 1900 and 1999. Also, I read mysteries by the dozen, most of which I won't review. Also, cancer sucks, so let's get out there and kick the shit out of it. I blog at All The Vintage Ladies - come visit me there!

Moonlight Reader's Reviews:

does the rich man share his plenty with me, as he ought to do, if his religion wasn’t a humbug?

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

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This was Elizabeth Gaskell’s first book, and is the second book by her which I’ve read. It’s really two books in one – the first, concentrating on John Barton (father of the titular Mary Barton) is a screed about structural inequality and capital versus labor, and the second, a courtroom drama focused around Mary Barton’s romantic travails. As is often the case with Victorian melodramas, Mrs. Gaskell took her time getting going – about the first third of the book, focused on John Barton and […]

I’ve had a few things of surpassing interest forced on me.

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

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Postern of Fate was the last book that Agatha Christie wrote, which makes reading it a bit of a melancholy prospect. Tommy and Tuppence make their last appearance as rather elderly individuals in their seventies. At the beginning of the book, they have moved into their new home and are putting it into order. The early part of the book is therefore spent revisiting classic childhood literature with the Beresfords, which is not entirely charmless, but it’s also not particularly swift moving. Tuppence, in particular, […]

She lets words break her bones. She hides her face at the slightest thing.

A Game of Hide And Seek by Elizabeth Taylor

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Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. A Game of Hide and Seek is a 1951 novel by Elizabeth Taylor. My copy was reprinted by NYRB Classics in 2012. I’ve not read anything by Elizabeth Taylor previously. This was not an easy book to read. It begins with a brief summer romance between the two main characters, Harriet and Vesey, as teenagers. They have been thrown together through family relationships and […]

TLDR: I enjoyed it, but it convinced me of nothing.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

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I’ve been meaning to read Hillbilly Elegy for a while, but I didn’t want to spend the $11.99 that they were charging on amazon. If I had caught it on sale for $1.99 or so, I probably would’ve bought it, but that never happened. It bubbled back to the top of my consciousness after reading that Ron Howard had bought the rights to create a Netflix series based on the memoir, and then yesterday when I was in the library, they had two copies on […]

Love is like a white rabbit?

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

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This review does contain some mild spoilers, although this is not a book that is particularly suspenseful, nor does it rely on a mystery to move the plot forward. I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her. And so we meet Mildred Lathbury, the first person […]

The Dark Waters of Doom…

The Case of Jennie Brice by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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The Case of Jennie Brice was first published in 1913 – my MMP edition issued in 1969 by Dell. The cover is by a well-known cover artist of the time, Garridos, who specialized in images of beautiful young women in dangerous situations. The image is very appealing, as I love these old covers, but has quite literally nothing in common with the contents of the book – there is no young blonde in a boat with a lantern to be found between these pages. I […]



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