Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A Gender-Bending Reign In Ancient Egypt

The Woman Who Would Be King by Kara Cooney

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When I was a little girl, my mom bought me a book about King Tutankhamen. It had beautiful glossy photos, and I was fascinated by the short life of the boy king…and the maybe-supernaturally shortened lives of the people who excavated his tomb and awakened the mummy’s curse. From there sparked a love of ancient Egypt, peaking when I was absolutely nerdy enough at age 9 or so to write a letter to the editor to correct one of the Detroit papers when they ran […]

If Suppiluliuma were here, I wonder what he’d make of the Arab Spring.

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In many ways, “the world” of 3200 years ago was vastly different from today. The Torah (or “Hebrew Bible”, if you’re so inclined) wouldn’t be written for another 600 years. If Homer existed, he wouldn’t be born for another 300 years (give or take). Elsewhere in the world, the ancient Puebloans of the American Southwest first formed. The 12th century BCE is as far removed from the formation of the Roman Empire as we are from the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. In short, […]

“Love has a most unfortunate effect on the brain”

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Narfna‘s recent review of this inspired me to re-read an old favourite. Intrepid Victorian spinster Amelia Peabody travels to Egypt after her father’s death, determined to explore the world and see the treasures she’s read about for so many years. On her way through Rome, she is forced to send her companion home, but meets a lovely young lady in distress, and they strike up an instant friendship. Evelyn Barton-Forbes is the granddaughter of an earl, seduced by a scoundrel and left destitute in Italy. […]

Amelia Peabody, can we be BFFs?

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This was SO MUCH FUN. Almost immediately, like after the very first sentence, I was quite enamored with the whole thing. The tone, the characters, the setting, the banter. Amelia is SO SASSY. She’s an example of one of my favorite character types: a person who can afford to disregard the limitations put on her because of some sort of exception or power. It’s delicious, really, watching her come into her own. So basically Amelia Peabody is a “spinster”* in the late 1800s England. Her […]



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