Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.”

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

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I actually really enjoyed this retelling of The Tempest*, particularly since I had just re-read the play as a refresher, so it was a lot easier to catch all the references and parallels. This is actually only my third Margaret Atwood book, which feels weird, since she is everywhere, and also because I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale three times. About time I branched out! (I’m sorry, Malin, I still haven’t read The Blind Assassin, which is a book I know you love.) *Thanks to andtheIToldYouSos […]

It started out fun

Beach Read by Emily Henry

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I first saw Beach Read (2020) by Emily Henry on my library’s website. I was about to head to Hawaii on vacation, and it seemed like the perfect book to bring with me. Unfortunately, there was quite a wait for it at the library, so I didn’t get to read it until after I returned from vacation. January Andrews is a best-selling romance novelist, but she is dealing with a lot these days. Most devastating, her father recently died of a heart attack. As difficult as this […]

Suicide mission- drama and heroics

Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher

The Wonder Engine by T. Kingfisher

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These two books form a duopoly – the Clocktaur war.  They are set in a fantasy world, which is well drawn and clearly has activities beyond what happens in this story. The premise of the story is that two countries/city states are at war.  Or rather, one city is sending strange machines that destroy everything towards the other city.  These are the Clockwork boys- mechanical things that appear to be made of bone, are covered with gears, and are very difficult to stop.  The front […]

A white whale that’s worth reading, years later

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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I kept seeing this book everywhere when it came out/ won the Pulitzer in 2015. It has taken me a good number of years to get around to it, but I’m so glad I did. I picked this one up in November, which is Remembrance Day/ Veterans Day month, so a WWII book seemed fitting. Doerr’s story follows two adolescents living in challenging times on opposite sides of WWII: Marie-Laure, a blind girl living in Paris with her father, and Werner, an boy living in […]

Lost in (audiobook) translation

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of the Jazz Age hit a milestone birthday- 95!- meaning that it fell into the public domain at the end of 2020. One of the podcasts I listen to, Planet Money, used that milestone as a reason to release a podcast episode that was an audiobook of the novel, as read by its hosts. Its been years since I last read The Great Gatsby, and in that interim I’ve read Ernest Hemingway’s non-fiction account of his time in Paris in […]

“It turns out life isn’t a puzzle that can be solved one time and it’s done. You wake up every day, and you solve it again.” – Chidi Anagonye

Life's Too Short by Abby Jimenez

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The only other review I’ve written this year was way back in January, when things maybe didn’t feel altogether shiny and new and possible, but they at least felt shinier than they do right now. At the time, I was recovering from surgery, radiation, and chemo from a touch of cancer, and looking forward to getting to whatever the new normal was going to be. The best laid plans, eh? Unfortunately, the cancer came back just a few months later. Not only did it come […]



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