Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Thomas Mann Stories

Blood of the Walsungs by Thomas Mann

Tristan by Thomas Mann

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“The Blood of the Walsungs” In this novella, a Prussian entrepreneur of Jewish descent (always a little dicey in German literature) starts a family and has children. His youngest children are the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde. We meet this family as the twins are in their early adulthood near the marriage of Sieglinde and a businessman. As we move our way forward in the story we are slowly made to understand that the twins’ connection is much stronger and stranger than mere brother and sister, […]

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Learning to Talk

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

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Families! Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – 3/5 Stars I went looking for some pictures of David Sedaris and his family after listening to the audiobook here and stumbled upon the article about the suicide of his sister Tiffany. Along with that article came some additional writings by people responding to it. This book is probably the strongest version of “You Can’t Go Home Again” in Sedaris’s writing, especially as it pertains not only to his sister, but to various of conversation represented […]

Shorts and Re-reads

Ripley Underground by Patricia Highsmith

Disgrace by Ayad Akhtar

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

Agnes of God by John Pielmeier

The Lion in Winter by James Goldman

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Ripley Underground – 4/5 The second Tom Ripley novel begins with the revelation that we’re about ten or so years on from the first novel, that Tom is now married and living off his “inheritance” from Dickie’s forged will. He’s in London and he’s become involved in an art forgery scheme. Recently an artist whom Tom had been connected with became a lucrative commodity and Tom was able to facilitate the sale of the artist’s work after he died. No one really knew for sure […]

Playing Games

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the tale of the friendship between Sam Masur, later Mazer, and Sadie Green, video game-designers, business-partners, and two-thirds of the founders of Unfair Games. It was video games that brought the unlikely pair into each other’s lives to begin with. Sam is recovering from a car accident that killed his mother and permanently damaged his foot while Sadie is visiting her cancer-patient older sister when the two begin gaming in the hospital’s game room. Years later, after some bumps […]

Well, this series took an unexpected turn

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley

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CBR14 BINGO: Cozy, because these books qualify as cozy mysteries, what with all the murders happening in this small village, always being discovered by an 11-year-old detective When I first met Flavia de Luce in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, I wasn’t 100% sure whether I liked her. After a couple more books, I had warmed to her, because the girl can really grow on a person. By the time I picked up The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, I was curious […]

Not until I helped kill a man did I realize how complex an act a murder can be

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. ― Donna Tartt, The Secret History “Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -Donna Tartt, The Secret History Based on my experience reading The Goldfinch, I knew that my next Donna Tartt book would be a serious undertaking. After being […]



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