Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me”

The Hours Before Dawn (1958) by Celia Fremlin

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In the autumn of 2011, I played Bella Manningham in an amateur dramatic production of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller Gas Light, which has given its name to the practice of deliberately undermining someone’s conception of their own sanity for selfish or sinister purposes. Bella is the wife who sees lights flicker, whose things won’t stay where she left them, who is increasingly convinced that she is disappearing deeper and deeper into her own mad mind.  “You mustn’t go on lying here in the dark, or […]

“…a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman.”

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

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I didn’t realize I could or would enjoy a book about horse racing, but here we are! I’m a bit bummed I missed my library book club meeting about this book because it would be fascinating for a discussion. In 2019, a master’s student of art finds a painting of a horse in his neighbor’s trash pile by the side of the road. He is intrigued and takes it to see what he can learn about it. Maybe it can be part of his thesis? […]

As the author says, it is Norman Rockwell with more Tupperware.

Home for Christmas by Susan Branch

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At first, I was not really into Home for Christmas by Susan Branch. I was wondering, “Where is Jim-Bob and John-Boy?” The cute hand-written text, the mix of illustrations and black and white photographs left nothing to the imagination. You knew the emotions the author wanted and where they were taking you. But then I was, “That’s not so bad. I mean it is nice not to have anything really bad happen. They are growing up poor, but they do not care/really know it, as […]

They sure did smoke all the time back in the day, didn’t they? (double bingo)

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart

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CBR14 Bingo: Question (the book’s title is a question and there is a central murder mystery where the identity of the murderer is in question) Young widow Charity Selborne is on holiday in the south of France with her friend Louise and they really have little planned except to enjoy the good food, nice drinks, beautiful scenery, and long drives. In Avignon, Charity befriends a young English boy who is also staying at the hotel, offering to take him with her on tours of the […]

August 2022 Leftovers

Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy

Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself by K.C. Constantine

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees by Bob Klapisch and Pete Solotaroff

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

Finley Ball: How Two Outsiders Turned the Oakland As into a Dynasty and Changed Baseball Forever by Nancy Finley

Sea Change by Robert B. Parker

The Hunting Wives by May Cobb

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

Ms. Tree, Volume 1 by Max Alan Collins

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Some extra books I read in August. What a miserably hot month… Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood**** Less a conventional biopic on The Mick and more a look at his life vis-a-vis his legend and the backdrop of postwar America. Not as thorough as I would’ve liked but still riveting given how Jane Leavy presents her subject.   Greenwich Park*** Again glad I slept on my review. I really liked how this started but after a while, it morphed into […]

“My ladies had changed nothing but the reasons for their pretense. If I had learned anything from them, it was this: only a fool lives in water and remains an enemy of the crocodile.”

The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Shadow Y’all. I finished this book May 17th for my library book club, and I am just now (finally) reviewing it. What. A. Journey. Big props to CBR Bingo for being the catalyst for me getting me out of this backlog and writing slump… The titular Henna Artist (Lakshmi) is a shadow in that she disappeared from her village and has been building a name for herself in the upper social circles of Jaipur as a henna artist. Her past catches […]



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