Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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[got me] to a nunnery!

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Heloise & Abelard: A New Biography by James Burge

The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy's Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici by Elizabeth Lev

Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love by Myriam Cyr

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I thought I was going to need some time to recover from the exquisite The Everlasting, but really it flung me head-first into a literal rabbit-hole. A warren. An abbey. A nunnery, if you will. Also- The Atlantic just posted a list of books that were done dirty by pandemic releases, and OF COURE The Everlasting resides within those vaulted halls. I was immediately drawn to Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici after she was mentioned several times in The Everlasting. A distant relative of her spots her likeness in the […]

In the 17th century, birds were appreciated for their beauty, and also their tastiness

Pasta for Nightingales: A 17th-Century Handbook of Bird-Care and Folklore by Giovanni Pietro Olina

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The common hoopoe gets drunk on fermented grapes; goldfinches suffer from epilepsy; to properly keep francolins, you must keep a small crate or case within the aviary for the birds to nestle down in. These are just a few of the handy tips that Giovani Pietro Olina offers in his 17th-century handbook on bird care, Pasta for Nightingales. This charming little tome is an English translation of a book written in 1622, called Uccelliera, which is Italian for The Aviary. The title of the English […]

Libris Mediocris

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

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*Sigh.* Folks. Before we get into this, the customary preamble. These things may seem unrelated at first, but hopefully they’ll make sense shortly enough. There’s a tossed-off line in Stella Gibbons’ excellent Cold Comfort Farm (the movie is also a scream if you haven’t seen it) where one of the characters, an irritating self-satisfied clod of a fellow, is working on a thesis which holds that all of the Brontes’ novels were actually written by their brother Branwell. The little-known film Titanic came out the winter after […]

A historical romance with Highlanders and the Gunpowder plot. Yup, that one.

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It will come as no surprise to anyone who actually bothers to read my blog, or check out my Cannonball progress, that I read a LOT. So much so that, fingers crossed, while I severely doubt I will be able to complete the triple Cannonball this year (it nearly killed all my joy of reading last year), if I actually manage to complete my current backlog of reviews and keep going, I will at least have completed more than two and a half the requirement, […]



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