I added Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul to my TBR last year after seeing the previews for the Judy Dench film of the same name and becoming intrigued by the relationship between the Indian and the Queen of England. Coincidentally I found a copy on Overdrive at the same time the film showed up on HBO making it the perfect The Book Was Better bingo book. Especially since the book really was better than the film. Abdul Karim was a clerk at the county jail […]
SO Shiny #CBRBingo
I have two recent reads that could qualify for our So Shiny bingo category but I read Ronan Farrow’s The War of Peace first so he gets the official tag. Ronan Farrow is the former MSNBC wunderkind best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning article on Harvey Weinstein as well as his recent expose on Les Moonves. Prior to his investigative journalism career Farrow worked for the Obama administration which is where a lot of the information in this book comes from. It is hard to […]
Birthday! #CBRBingo
Marita Lorenz was born on August 18, 1939 in Germany at the onset of WW2 to an American mother and German sea captain (making her a perfect candidate for the birthday bingo square). As a child Marita and her mother were imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after her mother, already on watch lists for being American, was accused of helping the incarcerated Jews. After her release from the camp and a sexual assault by a neighbor Marita became a withdrawn, troubled child who stopped going to […]
And So it Begins #CBRBingo
July is incredibly tough month for me at work, in a good way, so I haven’t been reading as much as I do the rest of the year. Most of my reading the last three weeks has been audiobooks on my commute and when I had a few moments to unwind at home I chose television over writing reviews. When I saw the first post about Cannonball Bingo I got excited because now it looks like I saved my backlog of reviews for the contest […]
Surprisingly, This is Not for the “Book is Better” Square
Bingo Square: Home, Something, Home I started watching the movie adaptation of this on a recent plane trip, and only realized once I was further into it, that Love, Simon was based on the novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, an often reviewed novel on Cannonball Read. My main motivation for starting the movie is that I quite liked the lead actor in Everything, Everything (I like that both the lead actors in that movie are basically working their way through YA film adaptions […]
All good things must come to an end
This book is a kind of bittersweet, in that it’s the last one in the main series. It’s a crazy long four books (well, five if you count the spinoff**) and it truly is the end of a journey. We’ve seen these characters grow from immature teens to adults who are willing to make tough decisions, and who are tangled in things far beyond them. The four years (or more) you spend at college change who you are as a person, and we get to […]