Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Historical (Fan) Fiction: *An Occasionally True Story

Bright We Burn by Kiersten White

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This book and this series goes well beyond my expectations that I held for it. I am not sure what I thought would happen and how I would feel but every other chapter was so compelling that I was lost to whatever they were feeling. The character work here especially just….*chef’s kiss*. I’ll get into it more below. Since this is the third novel in a series and I have not reviewed the other two this is just a quick and non-spoilery summary of these […]

A Land so Strange

A Land so Strange by Andrés Reséndez

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This is a short history providing a lot of context and background and additional sources to one of the more famous captivity narratives published from the New World during the colonization of the Americas. This book follows the journey of Cabeza de Vaca, a mostly low level Spanish finance official who joins a voyage to America alongside about 300 other people. Of the 300, four would survive, and that would come after eights years of the voyage during which he acts as a colonizer, a […]

Partners in Crime

Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie

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This is the first and only collection of short stories that Agatha Christie published with Tommy and Tuppence. The married spies and sometime crime solvers first showed up in The Secret Adversary in 1922, Christie’s second novel. There’s three more novels, and the one that I’ve read so far N or M, feels like a dramatic tone shift from these first two books. That’s in part because they become a kind of stand-in for Christie’s own sense of purpose being waylaid by WWII. They want […]

What Is the Point of Regret?

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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Best for: Those who like a little philosophy and exploration of life with their novels. In a nutshell: Nora Seed has decided to stop living. She finds herself in some sort of limbo, a library filled with alternate versions of her life not lived. Worth quoting: “This was it. No one needed her. She was superfluous to the universe.” “Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just … a load of bullshit.” Why I chose it: On my first flights since […]

Belated 2nd Thank You to llamareadsbooks!

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Two days before Christmas, there was a book shaped box waiting when I got home.  Having already received Stone, Sword, Table: Old Legends, New Voices I was not expecting a second Cannonball Book Exchange but llamareadsbooks went beyond my list of title suggestions and choose A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske too!  In addition to specific titles, I had put forth categories, one of which was LGBTQ+ romance.  I eagerly look forward to this book which T.J. Klune blurbed as, “Sublime prose, top-notch world-building, delightfully queer”. […]

Sweeping partisan saga

Exodus by Leon Uris

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Leon Uris is a master of the underdog novel, and his 1958 blockbuster is no different. It tells the story of the founding of Israel, beginning with the Jewish refugee camps in Cyrprus. Britain, one of the novel’s big bads, still holds Palestine as a colony, and refuses to let these refugees enter Palestine. A ship named the Exodus is found and a daring escape is made, eventually allowing the small existing Jewish population in Palestine to swell into a group large enough to form […]



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