Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

To Be a Diplomat’s Wife

An Unusual Courtship by Lynne Connolly

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Juliet is enamored of diplomat Val, but she believes that her scandalous family and poor prospects would make a poor political wife. But when Val’s fiancée reveals that she’s in love with another man, she supposes it wouldn’t be too bad to pretend to be engaged to him for the length of a state dinner. This is the second book in the Brazen Burrells series, about a trio of sisters who take Regency-era London with their beauty, wits, and little else. This is the story of Juliet, […]

An intimate portrait of the life of a polar bear

Ice Walker by James Raffan

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Non-fiction disguised as fiction. Plot: Nanu is a polar bear fresh from a miscarriage because she hadn’t packed on enough weight last summer to carry her pregnancy to term. We follow her from feeding herself, mating, hibernation, pregnancy, and taking care of her cubs, all while the ice gets thinner, the food less plentiful, and the growing danger from humans. Raffan started his career in the hard sciences and bailed real quick after he saw the kind of things you had to do to science […]

Time to start putting this one to bed.

Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun (Finlay Donovan, #3) by Elle Cosimano

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We’re definitely experiencing diminishing returns with this series, but I’m still enjoying myself. I think I’m ready for it to have a definitive ending, though. I don’t want the author to beat this horse to death just because we keep buying the books out of remembered affection for how crazy good we thought book one was. To be honest, I no longer remember most of the details of the plot of this book. Finlay and Vero have to find out who EasyClean is (the hit […]

Jane Smiley (1)

Moo by Jane Smiley

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“From the outside it was clear that the building known generally as “Old Meats” had eased under the hegemony of horticulture department.” This is a very mid-1990s novel about life on a midwestern college campus. Specifically we are at “Moo U”, which is obviously not it’s real name, but we go with it. We end up with several clues throughout the opening section here about the level of irony and farce we’re suppose to be reading into this novel. For example, nearly every building on […]

Tom Joad needs a bath

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath have stored…” Were you oblivious like me that these were the words in the first line of the Battle Hymn of the Republic? I’m not sure if these are the same grapes Steinbeck is referring to, but there is enough wrath in the world to go around, whether it’s the wrath of the Union army during the Civil War or the wrath […]

Math problems on Mars.

Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier

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I said in a status update while reading Singer Distance that it was giving me Contact vibes, and that’s true. The homespun science and grungy academic feel of the book, along with a group of characters working towards contacting aliens does give me the same feelings I get watching that movie (I have the book and I really need to finally read it!), but Singer Distance also has its own unique feel. This is an alternate history where back in the late 1800s, scientists spotted a message on Mars and began […]



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