Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.”

Matrix by Lauren Groff

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I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise. Here, it’s nuns. I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to […]

One of my favourite book club picks of the year

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

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Viv the orc barbarian has had enough of the adventuring life and leaves her band of fellow warriors after one last battle with a particularly challenging monster. Instead of fighting, she dreams of taking all her savings and putting them towards a business of her own. In the city of Thune, she plans to open a cozy little shop, selling something called coffee. Turning a worn-down livery stable into a pleasant café isn’t exactly something Viv’s warrior training prepared her for, but she manages to […]

End of Year Final

Phases of Gravity by Dan Simmons

The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore White

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Stella Maris by Cormac Mccarthy

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

Liberation Day by George Saunders

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

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Phases of Gravity One of the very few “realistic” novels by Dan Simmons. Usually his novels are science fiction, horror, fantasy, or some combination of those. Sometimes his books are noir or suspense, and even though those books take place in the real world, it’s just not quite the same thing as realism. Don’t tell Raymond Chandler I said this.  This book was written in the late 1980s and our lead character Dan Baedecker is a retired astronaut who has also in recent years becomes […]

This is a story about the brothers Lynch

Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater

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Spoiler warning! This book is the third and final in the Dreamer trilogy, which in itself is a follow-up to the four-book Raven Cycle. It very much doesn’t stand on its own and won’t really make sense unless you’ve read the previous books. The place to begin is Call Down the Hawk, or if you want to read all the books about Ronan, Adam, and their friends, The Raven Boys. I’m going to be honest, while I normally love Stiefvater’s writing and willingly go along […]

The Enola Holmes (movie) book

The Case of the Missing Marquess (Enola Holmes #1) by Nancy Springer

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This book was pretty short. I think it was about a five hour audiobook. I liked the narrator though and the story moved along. If you’ve seen the Enola Holmes movie, you know the general plot of this book. The movie was not fully true to the book, but I could understand why the movie changed the parts that it did. I pictured Millie Bobby Brown as Enola the whole time though. Watching the movie first doesn’t actually spoil the book either, which was fun. […]

Charlotte is a good person

What We Forgot to Bury by Marin Montgomery

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Man I seem to read a lot of books where people are straight up lying to each other. And if they’re not straight up lying, they’re gaslighting, so it’s either just as bad or worse. This book has a combo of both! You know something bad happened to Charlotte in her past, because she’s scared to leave the house, jumps at any sound, and leaves her basement door locked up tightly. We of course don’t get the story right away, but in short snippets throughout […]



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