Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Craftiest of Pensioners

The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman

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The Bullet That Missed is the 3rd in the series of the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries. I adore the characters and I can never get enough of them working through their difficult cases that often overlap other cases. This one starts as all the others do. The gang gets together to choose a cold case to hopefully solve when Elizabeth also receives word from a mysterious man telling her that she must kill a retired Russian agent who was once her lover or her best […]

Dario Fo (5)

Elizabeth by Dario Fo

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The full title of this play is Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman and in a lot of ways is similar to the recent film, The Favourite. One of my favorite lacuna in the theories about Shakespeare not actually being Shakespeare (he is) involves how many of Shakespeare’s roles were clearly shaped by the makeup of the company at a given time. Certainly a lot of different actors could play lots of different Shakespeare roles, but Richard Burbage, a good boy, or William Kemp were […]

William Gibson (1)

The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

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My AP students are rounding the bend on the school year and I assigned them one final out of class reading of their choosing, so I have been reading and rereading some of their choices. I really pressed some of them who have shown some weariness to look at plays as a source for their final reading. Here’s one I found in a Little Free Library that I think should work. It’s a classic that many of us read at some point or watched the […]

TC Boyle (1)

Drop City by TC Boyle

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“The morning was a fish in a net, glistening and wriggling at the dead black border of her consciousness, but she’d never caught fish in a net or on a hook either, so she really couldn’t really say if or how or why.” I read this years ago, and I more or less liked it, but I don’t think I understood it much. Or rather, it’s a perfectly understandable novel, but maybe you need some of the cynicism and realism of your 30s to seep […]

Wallace Stegner (2)

Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner

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“This book is an attempt to write a biography that is the history not of a personality but of a career.” I am not from the West and have spent almost no time there, except through books and movies and one trip to California, where I flew over most of it. I also wasn’t sure about Wallace Stegner as an historian, as he’s primarily a novelist, who once wrote in the voice of an historian. Regardless, we learn very early on that he’s been enlisted into […]

Louis Auchincloss (2)

The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss

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This is a decidedly tender novel that I wasn’t exactly expecting to be as good as it is. For one thing, I just read some Louis Auchincloss nonfiction, and while his thinking is very strong in those essays, the writing itself felt too pedestrian or pragmatic. But here, the language is very strong, lively, and breathed with spirit. Perhaps it’s the change in form or just the 25 years in between.  The novel is also unexpected in its form. We meet a young teacher on […]



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