Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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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:

(Mostly) Horror Roundup

London Rules (Slough House #5) by Mick Herron

The Drift by CJ Tudor

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

November (Darker Days) by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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London Rules (Slough House #5, Mick Herron) *** I enjoy the Slough House books, but I never do know what to write about them. They’re well written and the plot is usually creative and unpredictable, but in spite of that (or perhaps because of that) it’s always the same: River fucks something up, Louisa is prickly, Shirley is aggressive, Diana Taverner is sneaky and antagonistic and Jackson Lamb is smarter than everyone else. There is enough intrigue to keep things interesting (and the Apple TV […]

Ugh. Meh? Mwah. Ehn.

Lessons by Ian McEwan

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As in, I’m finding it hard to express my feelings about this book. Not because I enjoyed it (I didn’t). Eloquence is overrated anyway.  The plot: a young boy in 1960s England is sent to boarding school, is molested by his (female) piano teacher, then has a relationship with her that lasts for years and hampers him for the rest of his life. We watch Roland Baines grow up, faff around, have a child, fall in and out of love. The red thread in the […]

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 […]



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