Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About Zirza

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I am an English teacher from the Low Countries. Like everyone else I aspire to one day write a Booker Prize Winner, but until then I contend my self with reading stuff and writing about it. I try to keep the bitchiness to a minimum, but sometimes I can't help myself. In my spare time I enjoy complaining about the weather and sleeping. I lack the attention span for good books and the tolerance for bad ones. I am stuck in literary purgatory. Hey, at least it's warm here. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Zirza's Quick Questions interview.)

Zirza's Reviews:

Always this empty heart, always

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

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Dave Win is a thirteen year old school boy at the start of this novel. It’s 1960s England, and Dave – the bastard son of an Englishwoman and a Burmese man, long lost to the turmoils of his home country – grows up as the perpetual outsider. Dave is clever; he has won a scholarship to an elite boarding school, handed out by Mark and Cara Hadlow. The Hadlows are noblesse oblige: patrons of the arts, champions of the disadvantaged. When we first meet Dave […]

(Es)sex and Pirates

Glitterland by Alexis Hall

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Ash Winters is one of those characters you find in a lot of books: the Failed Male Writer. Once a darling of England’s literary scene, Ash now writes pulpy yet wildly successful thrillers as he battles with crippling depression. Then he meets Darian, frequently described by Ash as a glitter pirate: a male model from Essex. There’s spray tan, nylon and the kind of clothing that pairs glitter with artfully crafted holes. Ash is a snob, so he looks down on Darian, but Darian is […]

We’re in for nasty weather

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

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I wrecked my splenius capitis (it’s a big muscle at the back of your neck). How, you asked? Why, by being stressy over the holidays! Ain’t life fun? Anyway, that’s why I picked a book with a break-neck pace. I think.  Jace, fourteen, finds himself at the top of a rocky outcrop over an abandoned quarry after a dare. As he warms himself up for a practice jump (so his nerves won’t fail him the next day when it’s showtime and there’ll be girls), he […]

Great if you like Wes Anderson but unfortunately, I don’t. 

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

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On a beautiful June day in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is taken from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs to the Hotel Metropol. He enjoys the views of Moscow from the windows of his car. It will be the last time in decades that he is to set foot outside the doors of the hotel; the Commissariat, torn between Alexander’s nobility status on the one hand and his work as a revolutionary poet on the other, has sentenced him to house arrest. And so the […]

Tigers, Spooks and Podcasters

Real Tigers (Slough House #3) by Mick Herron

Spook Street (Slough House #4) by Mick Herron

A Murder Most Actual by Alexis Hall

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A.k.a. The reviews I didn’t feel like writing, but hey, I read the books.  Real Tigers & Spook Street I read the first two books in the Slow Horses series. I got them from my library, which unfortunately only carried translations.  Pro tip: translations suck and avoid them where you can.  They’re not bad translations, but all the whimsy and finesse are lost. I got the rest of the series in its original English, and whether that’s the sole reason I enjoyed the next parts […]

We care too much, or not enough

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

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It feels weird putting these two in the same review, but there you have it. I’ve been struck by the dreaded reading slump.  The Plot (Jean Hanff Korelitz) ** The plot of The Plot: author Jacob is struggling. His first novel made a modest impact, but didn’t sell well despite positive reviews. His second novel went ignored entirely. To make ends meet, Jacob teaches writing to a group of wannabes and one of them tells him the plot of a novel he is planning to […]



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