Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea…”

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

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All the way back in the ancient days of 2016, I read de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. That put famed author Marcel Proust on my radar. Last year I read about Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) reading Proust when recovering from a traumatic open heart surgery, and how Proust reconnected him to his love of reading. After that, I finally took the plunge! I spent four months reading through the 600+ pages of Swann’s Way, volume one (of six) of Proust’s In Search […]

Series for Fans of Time Team – don’t tell the author

The Lantern Men by Elly Griffiths

The Night Hawks by Elly Griffiths

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A number of years ago, an elderly cousin sent me the first book in the Ruth Galloway series, noting that it was about England and archaeology and beautifully written.  It languished on my shelf until this fall when I picked it up and am now on books 12 and 13 in the series.   The series revolve around Dr. Ruth Galloway (use her title please, she’s earned it), a forensic archaeologist specializing in bones and the bronze age, who on occasion is called in to help […]

Tech thriller doesn’t let pesky details like characterization get in the way of a foot-on-the-floor storyline

Chrysalis by Lincoln Child

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Enigmalogist Jeremy Logan is back in Lincoln Child’s newest thriller, Chrysalis. Three high-profile board members of the Chrysalis corporation have been found dead in as many days. Before each death, an email was sent to the company appearing to take responsibility. Jeremy Logan is discreetly hired to determine if these deaths are connected and if so, how. Soon Logan and Chrysalis will be reeling as more deaths occur, all seemingly tied to the launch of a revolutionary VR platform in less than a week. It […]

Absorbing historical fiction

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell was inspired by this painting of Lucrezia de’ Medici, Duchess of Ferrara – something about how skeptical, almost frightened she looks in her eyes was captivating to the author. The image becomes even more haunting when taken with the fact that it must have been completed around the time of her marriage to the Duke of Ferrara – with whom she lived for less than a year before her untimely, and some would say suspicious, death at only 16 years old. In The Marriage […]

so far off from what I usually read, and yet it’s the first book of 2023

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

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CW: there’s some off color ism language throughout that the modern day reader is likely to be mildly offended by–as you’ll see below, perhaps reading that helped me in some sense to not go into a spiral of re-evaluation If you, like me, are immediately put off by books that categorically fail the Bechdel test I do suggest you continue, including past the passage where two unnamed male characters talk about their onanism fantasies. This book, for all its glaring “THIS IS NOT FOR YOU”-ness, […]

Lydia Millet (2)

Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

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“When the bird landed on her foot the pop star was surprised.” This is an early collection of short fiction by Lydia Millet, whose books I recently found out were all on Hoopla, and I felt so rich in Millet, I over-borrowed. I was thinking this collection would be a lot like a lot of early collections, good, but no novels, and I am wrong. This is a really fun and great collection, and even better, short! Some of the stories: A recounting of the […]



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