Cannonball Read 15

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Lawyer by day, voracious reader by night. So many books, so little time!

Wanderlustful's Reviews:

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When the weather outside is frightful, Louise Penny is delightful

Dead Cold / A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

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I read this book on a weekend when it was far too cold to go outside (-25 Celsius) and it was a glorious experience to lounge in my snug and warm house while reading an icy murder mystery.  This was my first Louise Penny, which seems crazy given that she seems like she’d be the Venn diagram centre of my love for a good detective novel and my patriotic love for Canadian Lit.  The upside is that I’ve now entered Louise Penny’s world, and I’m […]

Bringing colour and life to a childhood under apartheid

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

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In the world of celebrity memoirs, this book is a gem.  Although Noah gives us bits and pieces of how he got from the ‘hoods of Johannesburg to replacing Jon Stewart on the Daily Show (ie: being the funny guy to avoid being an outcast), his book is really about growing up mixed race under apartheid in South Africa.  The stories are sometimes almost too wild to believe (he was pushed from a moving car to escape a potential murder or assault, the domestic violence described […]

I’m just a girl living in captivity

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi

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I’m a big fan of fiction set in the Indian subcontinent and have a sizeable reading history with these novels, so cracking this novel open felt almost familiar, even though a) I haven’t read it before; and b) its set in Afghanistan rather than the subcontinent proper.  I had been putting this one off in part because the novels I have read that have been set in Afghanistan tend towards the bleak- totally understandable given the events that have shaped the country in the last […]

Mediocre Non-Fiction Primer on Religious Conspiracy Theories

Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The DaVinci Code by Dan Burstein

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I have an almost flashbulb memory of reading The DaVinci Code– I was 20, backpacking Europe for six months and staying for a few days with my best friend at her live-in B&B job in London.  After Tube delays caused me to miss my discount early morning flight out to Berlin, I headed back into the city and spent the day reading Dan Brown’s thriller.  As a lapsed United Church churchgoer, I wasn’t heavily undone by any of the religious conspiracies in the novel, but […]

Too Bland to be Sinful

14th Deadly Sin by James Patterson

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This was my first foray into James Patterson’s works, and it might be my last.  I gather that I may be alone in my lackluster reviews, though, as Mr. Patterson has made quite an industry out of detective novels- enough of an audience that this novel is the 14th installment in the “Womens Murder Club” (or WMC) series.  As background, the WMC is made up of 4 professional women- a cop, a medical examiner, a lawyer and a journalist- who became friends through their involvement […]

Sex and Travel (Emphasis on the Sex)

Wanderlust by Elizabeth Eaves

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Wanderlust is Elizabeth Eaves’ memoir of her travels from her late teen years to her mid-30s, and like any travel memoir it suffers somewhat from the delusions of grandeur of its main character/author.  The friend who lent it to me did so with the disclaimer that, “she’s a bit pretentious, but aren’t all travel writers?  I think you have to be in order to think that other people are going to be interested in your travel diary.”  My friend is not wrong. I love to […]



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