Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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double dipping with Rivers of London and River Cartwright

Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aronovitch

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

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Once again, I am unhappy because I am all caught up in the Rivers of London universe. BUT- I thoroughly enjoyed this entry, and I was lucky enough to be able to dive right in to another irreverent British crime series! Amongst Our Weapons, the latest from Ben Aaronovitch, is a return to form. After the strange (but not entirely off-putting) Douglas Adams worship of False Value we have returned to the archaic and architectural weirdness of the rest of the Rivers of London series. It has […]

“But there are many fools in the world. One praises God for their existence and keeps out of their way.”

The Man in the Brown Suit (Colonel Race, #1) by Agatha Christie

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This was a fun outlier in Christie’s body of work, though it is actually one of her earliest published books. She doesn’t normally do thrillers or espionage (and when she does it’s often not all that great), or feature one-off main characters, or feature a narrative that has travel and adventure in it, but this book has all of that. It’s also unfortunately one of the more dated of Christie’s works because it takes place outside that domestic sphere her other work is so comfortable […]

Melania In Paris

Our American Friend by Anna Pitoniak

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There’s been a trend these last few years of taking popular female historical characters and putting them in espionage situations. Queen Elizabeth. Jackie O. I’ve never read any of these books but I suppose there’s something to be mined from the genre. There’s really no interesting way to do the same with Melania Trump, given her complicity in her husband’s regime. So Anna Pitoniak decides to tweak just a few things (very few things) and write a story that covers both ends of the Cold War, […]

February Leftovers 2022

Trouble Is What I Do by Walter Mosley

Sleeping With Strangers by Eric Jerome Dickey

The Trees by Percival Everett

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Democracy by Carol Anderson

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These are my February leftovers, i.e. books that I read but didn’t give a full review either cuz I didn’t have time or didn’t have much to say. There are fewer than normal this month because Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois took up most of my time. Trouble Is What I Do **** Another good entry in the Leonid McGill series. It’s short and that streamlines the story more than its predecessors. I still read these as if Leonid is dead and NYC is his purgatory where […]

“Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are – honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.”

City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Rating four stars (4.5, really) on the side of caution with full knowledge that I could come back here very soon and bump this up to five stars. How many five-star reviews is too many to give out in one month? Anyway, this book was great! This is only the second series I’ve read by Robert Jackson Bennett, but I feel like it might have bumped him up to my favorite authors list. I five-starred both published books in his latest series, so I had […]

January 2022 Leftovers

Hit Parade by Lawrence Block

Sex Criminals, Volume 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky

Devils In Exile by Chuck Hogan

Ex Machina, The Deluxe Edition: Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny

Munich by Robert Harris

Shella by Andrew Vachss

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz

No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfeld

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

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My resolution for Cannonball Read in 2022 is to only write reviews where I feel like I have much to say and then dump the others in a singular post at the end of the month to track how much I’ve read. This’ll spare me from writing 250+ words about books that I can’t even think of a hundred for. So… Hit Parade **** I enjoy these books and while this is the one I maybe enjoyed the least (did EVERY story need cutaway conversations with […]



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