Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Grab bag

Minty Alley by CLR James

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandr Hemon

No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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The Lazarus Project This novel came out in 2008 in the middle of the 2008 presidential election. That doesn’t really have much to do with the plot here, but the novel makes several references to the Iraq war as a backdrop to parts of the present action, as well as the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In addition, the novel spends a lot of time in early 20th century America, with a special focus on Eastern European immigrants in the US. The novel is mostly […]

Midsomer Murders She Wrote

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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I feel like I should get credit for reading two books here, as once again, one entire novel is sandwiched around another in Anthony Horowitz’s second Susan Ryeland/Atticus Pünd murder(s) mystery. And this time it’s murder squared. In Moonflower Murders, Susan Ryeland (our heroine from Magpie Murders, which I thoroughly enjoyed) is running a hotel on Crete with her boyfriend Andreas, but instead of enjoying paradise, she feels miserable. The hotel’s got money problems, she’s working 24/7, and her relationship with Andreas is souring. When […]

“The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.”

In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French

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I can see in this book where everything I loved about The Searcher got its start. However, I am not sad to no longer be in the minds’ eye of Detective Rob Ryan. The narration of In the Woods is entirely in first person, he is telling the reader the story as it happened from somewhere in the near future. He opens the book by announcing that he is an unreliable narrator. It is both true and not, depending on how you define that style […]

Devil House by John Darnielle

Devil House by John Darnielle

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So. My review of Devil House is going to be a bit unfair because the book was not at all what I was expecting. I could have sworn I saw a review claiming this book was really creepy/scary with a dash of gore. In my opinion, that is 100% false. There is a description of an eye injury that I had to skip because I can’t tolerate eyeball stuff. But the story did not creep me out or scare me at all. The story is […]

Gentrification Meets Get Out in Brooklyn

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole

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I couldn’t put down this book after starting it. I burned through it in one and a half days, because sleep,  it it was engaging all the way through and the ending was insane. Loved the story, as it’s something that resonates with me (gentrification in NYC has gotten so bad and so many people have been displaced/ out priced because of it). I also loved the slight sci-fi elements of this book, a turn I was not expecting as it starts out as a […]

“What beautiful rebellion … to feel anything at all.”

What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

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I am a book reader because I love to escape and imagine the lives of others. Books are a way to touch lives that I would never be able to reach in my limited, brief time here on Earth. I have spent my 40 something years here mostly in the United States, post colonialism and legal slavery, with access to the Internet at my fingertips for the half of my life that seems most relevant to me now. With all the luck that brought me […]



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