Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I worked my worry into baguette dough.

The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living by Louise Miller

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CBR14 BINGO: Dough Square (BINGO! Series to Dough BINGO! Bodies to Elephant) (Lots of dough. Pie dough in particular.) I don’t think that I realized how much heavy stuff I had been reading as of late until I picked up this book. The levity was much appreciated. Another book unearthed by keyword searching for CBR Bingo. Olivia is a pastry chef at an exclusive Boston club and is sleeping with her married and much older boss. After a Baked Alaska mishap that involves the fire department, Liv flees to […]

…seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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HALF CANNONBALL! CBR BINGO: Verse Square (BINGO! Rec’d to Time) (This book is part of the “Mandelverse” along with Station Eleven and Glass Hotel: pandemics, Shakespeare, violins, stories, airports, and heartbreaking connections between seemingly disparate characters.) I’m so late to the party on this one, but I’ll add mine to the pile of reviews. This small little novel holds four big stories spanning just as many centuries. In the early 20th century, a young man whose brother will inherit the family estate in England is unceremoniously sent to Canada after […]

Journey to the East

Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse

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This short novel begins with the narrator explaining to the reader that they are moving into a journey at the behest of “The League” a mysterious organization that is concerned with Eastern religion, enlightenment, and a code of sorts. Our narrator also realizes that something has failed in his journey and he is investigating what that is. His journey to the East, however, also starts and ends in the southern part of Germany, not expressly known for being a haven of Eastern religion, and so […]

The Ripliad….no wait, the Lord of the Rips…..The Rippit.

Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith

The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith

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Ripley’s Game – 3/5 This is a reread of this one (I am rereading the whole series) and I liked it better the second time through. Two things happen early on in the book that are very important. First, Tom Ripley is asked to considered doing a murder for hire against two mafia enforcers, and next, Tom is annoyed at a party guest who kind of shows him up one evening. Tom does not want to do the murder, finding murder distasteful, even when necessary. […]

More Mann Stories

A Man and his Dog by Thomas Mann

Felix Krull by Thomas Mann

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A Man and His Dog – 3/5 I am not sure here what the actual story is. But it’s also like 70 pages, which seems pretty long for a novella, I am not sure what the actual story is, right? Specifically, we are dealing with a long description of a man getting a Pointer, which is vague, given that there are several varieties of pointers to choose from. We learn about the pointer from it’s breed specifications, from it’s character, it’s demeanor, and from the […]

“I want you to see me. That’s why I shine like this.”

Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa

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CBR Bingo: Recommended When I was in the early days of my summer of Irish fiction, I visited a couple friends in DC and one of them passed off her copy of this novel to me. “When you get a moment, I think you’ll like it. It’s an easy read, but not a dumb one–more like where you feel better at the end of it.” Since I read plenty of serious and/or bleak stuff, I’m always grateful for a recommendation like that, but it took me […]



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