Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Isn’t it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up? Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.”

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

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Valency has always lived a dull and restrained life under the thumb of her family, but decides to start living how she likes when she learns she has only a year to live. I knew the plot twist of this book before I got into it, though I’m not sure how – maybe the plagiarism controversy of Colleen McCullough‘s The Ladies of Missalonghi? Anyway, luckily it didn’t really affect my enjoyment. This book has all the hallmarks of an LM Montgomery book – the rich […]

The Calm Before the Storm

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

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For two summers the Cazalets – grandparents, three sons and their wives, and their numerous children – gathered in their family country home. Caught up in their domestic dramas, they take little notice of the encroaching threat of war – at first. This is the first of the five Cazalet Chronicles, a series which, drawing upon the experiences of the author and her own family, follows wealthy English family in trade through the turbulent years of World War 2 and its aftermath. Being the first […]

“His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.”

Hiroshima by John Hersey

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Originally a long-form article written in 1946, this is the story of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with a follow up from decades on documenting the ups and downs of the survivors’ lives. This far on from the event, the enormity of the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is commonly known, even if it’s still playing out even today. As such it’s rather hard to fully understand how much of a sensation this book was at the time […]

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

1984 by George Orwell

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I don’t often reread books, the old adage of so little time, so many books ticking like a clock behind me. This is the book I have reread the most, at least 10 times at this point, and the book that I say is my favorite book of all time, depending on the audience. (My favorite book is really Lamb by Christopher Moore, but that is a fictional “what if” about the life of Jesus, that entire chunk that is missing in the Bible, and […]

She loves moths, people!

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter

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As a kid, I hated bugs. I feared many of them. But for some reason, in junior high, I fell in love with Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost. I recently remembered how I’d re-read my favorite scenes aloud, imagining myself as the lead girl. But for the life of me I couldn’t remember anything else about it, so I decided a re-read was in order. The book was written in 1909, and is a companion to Freckles, which I have not read. This caused some […]

La Parisienne

The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola

Nana by Émile Zola

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The Ladies’ Paradise – 4 stars Denise Baudu comes dirt-poor to Paris with her younger brothers to work at her uncle’s shop, but instead goes to work at its greatest competitor – the ever-growing department store the Ladies’ Paradise, presided over by the Great Seducer Octave Mouret, who falls in love with Denise only to find out she may be one of the only things in the world he cannot buy. I was in the mood for a Victorian novel, but none of the usual […]



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