Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Is a New Yorker in London the opposite of an Englishman in New York?

I'm Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

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3.5 stars Hugh Cassidy is an ambitious man. He knows exactly what he wants from life, he’s going to run for mayor of his hometown, from thence devote his life to politics. While his parents may not have been particularly distinguished, they clearly loved one another and raised Hugh and his siblings to believe in hard work, as well being moral and upstanding people. Hugh is in England to try to track down the runaway daughter of a good friend (and as the story progresses […]

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

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Imagine this: you and your friends go on a celebratory weekend holiday to a luxurious yet remote retreat. You all go way back: to university, to secondary school, perhaps even before that. Yet inevitably your lives have drifted apart since then. You’ve all grown up, you’ve all changed, which makes it all the more awkward when everyone tries and fails to fit back into the roles you used to occupy. Maybe your dowdy best friend is now more successful than you, and you try not […]

Startup Wife

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

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Every book probably has a philosophical core, if you look hard enough. The act of writing itself, even a review, even one done without the benefit of the gift for crafting a plot (as mine are), is probably rooted in some sort of understanding of the way the world works. It’s all an expression of philosophy, a point of view, one means of making sense of some of the chaos. In some cases, that’s the draw of the novel itself – the desire to sink […]

secrets, lies, and lockdown

56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

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“Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.” It’s already apparent we’ve got a lot of pandemic media headed our way. All the long-running TV series, of course, tried to grapple with it immediately, mostly poorly, and we’ve had a few films jump at the chance as well. Emma Donoghue’s Pull of the Stars, despite being about the 1918 flu and being released in summer 2020, was not a pandemic […]

“we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something”

Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

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I still have yet to read Normal People, Sally Rooney’s hit novel, or watch its adaptation. I do a lot with Irish literature, but somehow that hype train mostly bypassed me (and I’ll be honest, it’s probably due at least in part to the snobbishness of the rather arbitrary line between literary and mass market fiction–I love some mass market but the fact that this is work for me means I prioritize the literary stuff). Nonetheless, her follow-up, Beautiful World, Where Are You? was chosen by the book club […]

What will you do with the time you have left?

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

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So….I downloaded this audiobook on Libby, thinking that it was a different TJ Klune. I thought I was borrowing The House in the Cerulean Sea. So I was Extremely Confused to be listening to a story about a real a-hole of a lawyer who dies suddenly but ends up sticking around as a ghost. This is no one’s fault but my own, of course, though it may explain why it took me a while to warm up to this story. Wallace Price is the a-hole […]



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