Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Do You want to Build a Snowman (I Hope Not)

The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

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I usually like to start a series from the beginning, but I had already seen the movie The Snowman with Michael Fassbender, so decided to just try the novel by Jo Nesbø and see how they compared. It probably would have been better if I had done those two things in reverse order, but that’s how it was. This is the seventh book in Nesbø’s series featuring Norwegian Detective Harry Hole. Harry, like all good, classic detectives, has his issues – he’s an introvert, but […]

“I devoured this.” V. E. Schwab

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

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As a book lover, I couldn’t resist reading something called The Book Eaters. Especially with the review quote from V. E. Schwab (whom I love) “I devoured this.” Sunyi Dean’s novel is set in a dark fantasy world where there are a group of book eaters who are not human, but instead subside by eating books, which gives them the knowledge in the book. There are also mind eaters who instead eat human brains and gain knowledge that way. Devon is a princess from one […]

Lost in the Noir of Iceland (And Liking It)

The Dark Iceland Series (1-6) by Ragnar Jónasson

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After reading the Martin Beck novels last year, I decided to continue with Nordic noir. I had heard about a series set in Iceland, specifically the remote area of Siglufjörður, and featuring  a young detective named Ari Thór Arason. I read these novels on Kindle and on Audible, where it helped to hear the correct pronunciations of some of the more challenging (to me) place names. Then author is supposed to be a big fan of Agatha Christie (as am I). He has translated fourteen […]

Saxon sisters in post-Roman Britain

Dark Earth by Rebecca Stott

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CBR Bingo: Question Most historical fiction set in England involves a few specific historical time periods: the high/late medieval era (think Chaucer or Thomas Malory), the Elizabethan era, the Victorian era, WWI and WWII. But the early medieval period (the time we once might’ve been used to calling “the Dark Ages”) is less popular, though there have been standout novels set in the era (Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s novels such as Sword of Sunset, Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles). This period of flux following the Roman withdrawal from […]

“To die like the skylark”

The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

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CBR Bingo: Bird I joked a couple years ago that the best day is Wake Forest Press Book Club Day, in part because you never know when it’s going to happen. Wake Forest Press focuses on publishing Irish poetry, particularly the Irish poets who aren’t, say, Seamus Heaney or Eavan Boland and claimed by a Big Five publisher. Because it’s a small operation, books come out a bit irregularly and also during the pandemic, shipments were sometimes oddly spaced (I once got three volumes all […]

A Whole Cast of Jessica Fletchers

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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In The Thursday Murder Club a group of retirees gather weekly to solve puzzles and mysteries – courtesy of a friend who has retired from the police force and who has a pile of unsolved cold cases to amuse and intrigue them. The story is told from more than one viewpoint and the reader is given the choice to read between the lines of some accounts, or to consider the reliability of the narrator. The Club soon evolves from being armchair detectives to the real thing […]



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