Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“It’s a library, Daphne. If you can’t be a human here, where can you?”

Funny Story by Emily Henry

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Take the plot of one early 2000’s B grade rom com, and add intense emotional stakes and sex, and you have yourself an Emily Henry novel. Plot: Daphne has a job she loves, just bought her first ever house, which she plans on sharing with her “tv handsome” fiancé who is also loaded, and she is about to recapture the magic of her youth by finally launching an overnight readathon where kids stay overnight at the library reading and raising money for the library she […]

“You’re the reason for for the word wonderful. It really shouldn’t be used for anything else.”

Funny Story by Emily Henry

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CBR16 Sweet Books: Exciting Daphne used to have the perfect life. Working as a children’s librarian, living in a beautiful house with her fiancée Peter, Then, returning from his bachelor party, a shame-faced Peter confesses that he is in fact in love with his best friend Petra, and Daphne has one week to move all her things out of the house (which is owned entirely by Peter). Concluding that Petra’s equally dumped boyfriend Miles probably has some free space in his flat, Daphne moves in […]

Love and Sisterhood in Sunshine Falls

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

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Ooh, my first Emily Henry book, and I really liked it. Our main character Nora Stephens is a literary agent in NYC, and her only focus outside of her job is her younger sister, Libby. Nora has been dumped multiple times by romantic partners who founds new loves in small towns, and the book plays with these tropes when Libby asks Nora to go on essentially a sisterly babymoon to Sunshine Falls, NC. While there, Nora runs into editor Charlie Lastra, whom she had previously […]

My new favorite Emily Henry book.

Funny Story by Emily Henry

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“What do we love?” “Your fake relationship,” Ashleigh says. “Well, I don’t,” I say. “Now there’s no good way to get out of it. I mean, when we ‘break up,’ Peter will get to feel smug and superior about that. “That’s no problem,” Miles says, pouring a taste of white wine for each of us. “All we have to do is get married, and then stay together until they split up. And if they have kids, just have one more than them. If they get a dog, we get a […]

Different People Like Different Things

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

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Given a glimpse at some stats it would seem my re-read and this review are redundant (4.5 out of 5 stars from 75,912 ratings on Amazon; 4.1 on Goodreads from 988,148 ratings), but here I go:  Glorious! 4.5 stars! All the laughter and the joy! Sincere emotions! Hail fellows well met! Amazon’s Version: Nora Stephens… agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small town transformation for Nora, who she’s […]

a thousand apologies and what feels like a thousand reviews (through November 2023)

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Kindred by Octavia E Butler

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Hinumegin er mars by Sólrun Michelsen

Trust by Hernan Diaz

How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't by Ian Dunt

Happy Place by Emily Henry

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It by Owen Jones

In the Beginning was the Sea by Tomás González

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene

Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

The City & the City by China Miéville

A History of Burning by Janika Oza

Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert

Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin

Passion Simple by Annie Ernaux

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Forget Me Not by Julie Soto

Hotel of Secrets by Diana Biller

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

The Late Mrs. Willoughby by Claudia Gray

Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon

A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within by Rory Stewart

Rivals by Katherine McGee

Reign by Katherine McGee

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

The Iliad by Homer, Emily Wilson

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

10 Things that Never Happened by Alexis Hall

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

A Dangerous Kind of Lady by Mia Vincy

A Little Life by Hanya Yanighara

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Nick and Charlie by Alice Oseman

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

The Starting Over Game by girl_with_kaleidoscope_eyes

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Edinburg by Alexander Chee CBR15: Sex True fact, when someone British asked me what I was reading I pronounced this “Edin-BERG” and to their credit they didn’t laugh but instead asked, with some horrified sincerity, if that’s how Americans say it. It’s not! At least, not on purpose. It’s just how can the English language claim to have been invented in a country that seems to not have grasped even a shred of understanding of how the various letters in it work? I digress. This is […]



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