Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

1960’s noir, an art heist, dark family secrets, vintage cars, and loads of sex

Tenebroso by thesehands

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Tenebroso by thesehands Ronan was a portent, an omen, a sign that Adam might be in real danger; Declan had sent the most dangerous person he knew to protect him. ― thesehands, Tenebroso As he lay in Adam’s arms, Ronan noted the differences between what he remembered and what he currently felt. Adam was not as bony as he used to be, no longer elongated with the awkward stretch of adolescence. He was warmer than Ronan’s memories, perhaps only because he was real and tangible […]

We’ve done it all before and now we’re back to get some more.

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

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Sometimes I think the only way to keep something forever is to lose it and let it haunt you. ― Casey McQuiston, The Pairing “Those men are terminally straight.” “Nobody’s straight on a European vacation.” ― Casey McQuiston, The Pairing CBR16 Bingo: Golden This book contains golden everything. From the food (golden honey, golden grains, golden baked bread, golden pastries, golden saffron), to the characters (sun-kissed and golden, golden hair, golden skin), and emotions (golden memories, golden opportunities, and people more precious than gold), just […]

For any girl who ever broke up with a guy because her friends or family didn’t approve

Persuasion by Jane Austen

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CBR16 BINGO: Liberate, because Anne liberates herself from her ridiculous family and finds love Double BINGO! Diagonal: Détente, Fiasco, Dreams, Horses, Liberate Four corners and center square: Bananas, Détente, Rings, Liberate, Dreams Poor Anne Elliot is saddled with a vexing family. Her father and older sister, Elizabeth, are snobs of the highest order, while her younger sister, Mary, does her best to make herself the center of attention and whines about every minor inconvenience. Anne is, by any sane person’s standards, practically perfect in every […]

Murders in the Rue Morgue

Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe

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Years ago I lost a trivia round because I insisted that the “Father of the Mystery Novel” could not be Edgar Allen Poe. On what planet could that not be Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holmes!? This turned into me having more beers and ranting that it makes sense for Poe to be the father of horror, but not mystery. At the time I’d read The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, Cask of Amantillado, and Masque of the Red Death. Well, it turns […]

Autumnal Reading

1979 by Val McDermid

The Survivors by Jane Harper

De Metsiers by Hugo Claus

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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After not having read much for a couple of weeks (work has been hell), I once again found myself in a place with terrible internet connectivity and a pile of books. Worse things have happened, particularly because the books I ended up selecting all turned out to be pretty dang good. 1979 (Val McDermid) **** Allie Burns is a woman in a man’s world. An Oxbridge graduate, she works as a journalist for a small Scottish newspaper. She hopes to make it big but so […]

Justice on Four Wheels

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

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It’s fairly normal to get book recommendations from TikTok these days, I suppose, but maybe not quite in the way that I did. Sensing some primal need in me for courtroom drama, my algorithm has been steadily feeding me clips from Netflix’s TV adaptation of The Lincoln Lawyer for weeks. In every clip I’ve seen thus far, the protagonist gets his client off with some slick legal trick, exasperating judge and prosecutor alike. It’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, premise-wise, but the execution seemed especially […]



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