Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The plot within the plot

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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My boyfriend read The Plot (2021) by Jean Hanff Korelitz and recommended that I read it. Somehow I got it into my head that it was also one of President Obama’s recommended books from 2021, but I just checked and it’s not on his list. However, because of these recommendations (real and imagined), I started this book with pretty high expectations. It also helped that the Amazon blurbs had language like: “Insanely readable,” and “breathtakingly suspenseful,” which sounded promising. Jacob Finch Bonner is our protagonist and a […]

Marriage and friendship in middle age

Good Company by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

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This book crept up and grabbed me by the heart, in the best possible way. Good Company centers around the relationships between four friends, in two married couples. Flora and Margot, were roommates in New York in their twenties, both working actors. Flora meets and marries Julian, another actor. Margot marries David, a pediatric surgeon. “Good Company” is the name of the small theater company that Julian and, to a lesser extent, Flora, run. Twenty years later, Flora and Julian have moved to LA with […]

Grab Bag

Mine by Robert M McCammon

Boathouse by Jon Fosse

Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover

The Miranda Obsession by Jen Silverman

Tell Her Story by Margot Hunt

Zaddy by Sarah Ramos

Cuckoo's Cry by Caroline Overington

Dear Seraphina by Avery Bishop

Benarnda's Daughters by Diane Exavier

The Wrong One by Dervla McTiernan

Tisoy by Berneice McFadden

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Mine – 3/5 Stars Ahhhh, 1990. It’s weird to think about how little cultural cache SDS, Weather Underground, and other Leftist groups from the 1960s and 1970s have any more when talked about in media products. This book is not exactly about a Leftist group, but more of a kind of amalgamation of these types of groups, separatists groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army, and even the Manson Family. In Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi describes the Mansons as “Right-wing hippies” and I think, in the […]

Old School Hollywood with Demon Deals

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

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Holy crap, I want more! Siren Queen is the story of Luli Wei, a star who stole her sister’s name to become famous and became the monster in many films, but also managed to find love and friendship outside the monstrous side of Hollywood. There are elements of this that remind me of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, mainly the narration style and the old Hollywood setting. But do not go into Siren Queen expecting the same story or same kinds of characters. Luli […]

“People aren’t alone, and they never have been.”

The Overstory by Richard Powers

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  I don’t think I intended to read this book in April, but the fact that it seemed to be calling from my ever-growing TBR pile (and the library began sending notices that I was out of renewals for this one). It’s length is a little intimidating – at 500 pages, it had the potential to create a bottleneck in moving through that TBR pile. While for me, April is not an ideal month for reading (especially not this year, as more people and events […]

A Dead Djinn in Cairo

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark

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  I accidentally read this series out of order. I read The Haunting of Tram Car 015 sometime last year and sort of pieced my way through the rest in the series until I reached A Dead Djinn in Cairo, which is the first book, this spring. It says something about P. Djèlí Clark’s world-building that each story felt standalone and yet very much grounded in a fully realized world. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’awari investigates disturbances between the residents of Cairo and the djinn they share their […]



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