Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

More Bertie, Please

Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith

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CBR Bingo: Reader’s Choice (replacing the Machinery square) Series: 44 Scotland Street. I read (and reviewed) Book 1 in 2017. What I remembered about this series prior to reading this book: Not very much–I definitely remembered Bruce, the Gaston of the book, who had some underwear-related adventure in the first book that made me laugh out loud although I can’t remember the details any more. And Bertie, the 6 year old whose mother forces him to wear pink pants because she’s trying to raise him […]

A good young adult book that I probably read too late in life.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan

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I’m rounding down on this one for now, after weeks (months) of letting it sit in limbo because I couldn’t make up my mind how I felt about it. But this is a true 3.5 star book right here. Parts of it I loved and found very funny and charming and parts of irritated the hell out of me. The ending is very heartwarming and the characters are ultimately lovable. I think I might have just missed my window on loving this one. Too bad, […]

Mixed Grill

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

Who will Pay Reparations on my Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Dreamland by Sam Quinones

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Necronomicon by HP Lovecraft

Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

The Iliad by Homer

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Whores for Gloria by William T Vollmann

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Celebration by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Stony the Road – 5/5 Stars Yet another book that presented answers to questions in part, but mostly added to my reading list, this slight book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. was written to support a documentary and to provide additional resources, analysis, and insight into the post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods in the US. For a more robust understanding of the Reconstruction era, Gates points us to WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, which was one of the first extensive histories […]

From Cranky to Charming

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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CBR Bingo – Rec’d I picked up Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove after reading Leedock’s review and witcherwill’s suggestion in the comments. It took me awhile to warm up to the book and its main character. Ove is a widower who lives alone and has a metric ton of quirky habits. He is precise to the extreme. Everything has to be just so. He likes his lines clean and exact. He is excellent at building and repairing things. He gets infuriated by his neighbors ignoring […]

Whitehead goes for a totally different vibe here–and it works very well

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

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Free: got this new book from my library, which purchased it on my recommendation (and, as always, gets a chunk of change from me at year end as a blanket thank you! libraries are great!) This book started off somewhat slowly for me, which I found surprising since clarity of vision and scene has always stood out to me as one of Whitehead’s strengths. In both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, the setting is almost as important (more important?) than the characters who move about it. […]

This one didn’t even blurb The Secret History but I was all in

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

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I mean, I frequently want novels I like to last longer, but in particular I wanted this novel to last longer at the outset, when I wasn’t even super invested in the various characters! The payoff would have been…immense. As it were, there are very, very strong The Secret History vibes in this book except that the twist/answer is not given away at the start but revealed, slowly, over time. There’s been a murder, this much we know for certain. Oliver served time for the crime, but […]



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