Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Book of Three

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

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After reading a smidge too much big kid literature, I decided to reread one of my favorite YA book series of all time: The Chronicles of Prydain. I reread these stories at least half a dozen times in middle school through high school. They inspired my love of fantasy stories that persists to this day, and I can tell that the lessons they imparted were important, because they were hard for me to hear as a kid. The story is set in a half-history half-mythological […]

The Plot Sickens

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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Jacob Finch Bonner is a once-promising novelist who has fallen on times so hard he is teaching at a nothing of an MFA program in Nowhere, Vermont. The literary world has forgotten him and his agent doesn’t even bother asking about his so-called work in progress anymore. Most of his students haven’t read his book or even heard of him. Jacob is quite confident none of them will be even as modestly successful as he was, until Evan Parker walks into class. Rude and off-putting, […]

“It’s harder to come back than it is to arrive”

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

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CBR Bingo Square: Violence Maddeningly, I now don’t know what put Dorothy Hughes’s 1947 noir In a Lonely Place on my radar. (I thought it was Susan Straight’s 1001-book literary map of America, but…apparently not?) All I know is that I am a sucker for A) mystery novels, and B) novels about my home state, and what reliably ticks both boxes? Noir. And Dorothy Hughes was a new discovery for me, which made this novel all the more appealing. Also, deliciously, In a Lonely Place isn’t a […]

“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

The Terminal List by Jack Carr

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I mentioned to a friend that I was entering the Dad Books/Daddington Island* phase of my reading life (thrillers, history, etc.). A few days later, that friend handed me a stack of Jack Carr books. You may be remember the Amazon Prime series based on the book – a Navy SEAL named Jack Reece comes comes home from a bad mission, bad stuff happens, and he has some vengeance to attend to. That’s the gist of the plot. No surprise – the book is better […]

It’s a bestseller for a reason!

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

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If you knew the day you would die, how would that change the way you live? Chloe Benjamin explores this idea in her second novel about four siblings who, in New York in 1969, learn just that. Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya sneak off to see a fortune teller whose gift is knowing your death date. After they each learn how long they’ll live, we hear about their separate stories. At 17, Simon leaves New York for San Francisco with his sister Klara, who is […]

“it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things”

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Oops, it’s been a hot minute since I wrote a review. I have been reading, but I also spent four months trying to do my job and also angst about whether I would still have that job in the fall, which ate up a lot of my focus. (I do! I got tenure!) Then I went traveling and continued not writing reviews, though also still reading quite a bit. But CBR Bingo is a nice little prod to get back to it, in the back half of […]



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