Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Milan Kundera (1)

The Joke by Milan Kundera

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“So here I was. Home again after all those years.” This is Milan Kundera’s first novel, and of all the one’s I’ve read it’s more or less the most straightforward. It’s not straightforward, but the conditions of the plot are. We meet Ludvik in the opening pages returning home to a small town in Moravia some seventeen years since he’s last been there. We know something has defined this return in ways that have complicated it, but we’re not year sure how. We also learn […]

Butterflies with a side of murder

A Dangerous Collaboration by Deanna Raybourn

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Lured to an island by the promise of rare butterflies, lepidopterist Veronica Speedwell finds herself delving into another mystery. The charismatic Lord Templeton-Vane is a friend of Malcolm Romilly, whose wife disappeared shortly after they said their wedding vows. After his loss, and the subsequent gossip, he retreated into his secluded world, which includes a castle with lots of delightful hiding places. As part of the invite, Lord Templeton-Vane (Tiberius) asks Veronica to pretend to be his fiancee, for propriety’s sake. Nothing to do with […]

Robin McKinley (1)

The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

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“She scowled at her glass of orange juice.” Robin McKinley is not one of those writers I ever read when I was younger, so I don’t have any in-born fondness for her. Which is perfectly fine because from the outset of this novel, I really enjoyed it. It’s a fantasy novel that begins in a far flung post on the edge of a kingdom. Our protagonist, Harry, has been sent to the post to live with her brother after her parents have died. She’s to […]

Well, at least I knew what I was getting into.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

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I read the prequel to this last year, the unmitigated turd soup called Angles & Demons. I hated the book. The big reveal at the end wasn’t much better than the it was all a dream trope that I tacked on to the end of a short story I wrote in the third grade. Even third grade me realized how trite and predictable it was to pull that out of the hat. Well, Dan Brown returns to tell an equally stupid story about Robert Langdon […]

Big Finish!

The Toll: Arc of a Scythe Book 3 by Neal Shusterman

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This series is outstanding. This final book hit all the right notes and brought its several storylines together in a coherent, exciting and generally satisfying way. My review of Thunderhead indicated that there was a biblical tone to that book, and that tone is even more obvious in The Toll. But this is not a series about religion so much as about human nature, politics and belief. The Toll brings together four storylines. There is the story of Scythe Faraday and his search for the […]

Monica Ali (1)

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

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“An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen’s life began–began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly–her mother, Rupban, felt an iron fist squeeze her belly.” This is a 2003 novel from the writer Monica Ali, which was nominated and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It lost to a bad book, but I also don’t think it was the best remaining book. Anyway! The novel begins with Nazneen, a Bengali woman living in Dhaka. She finds out that her father […]



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