Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Hobb-a-thon Part II

Dragon Keeper: The Rain Wilds Chronicles Book 1 by Robin Hobb

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cbr18bingo – One I have been holding off on starting this part of Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series. The Farseer Trilogy, The Liveship Traders Trilogy and The Tawny Man Trilogy were all fantastic, but when I looked at Dragon Keeper, the first of the four novels in The Rain Wilds Chronicles, I was a little bummed out. It looked like the characters I knew and loved from her previous novels weren’t going to get much page time and a whole new set of […]

Ferrante did it better

The Book of Goose: A Novel by Yiyun Li

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Cbr18bingo – Bird Almost as soon as I started reading The Book of Goose, I was reminded of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Both Ferrante’s series and Li’s The Book of Goose feature impoverished girls living in post-WWII Europe. Both feature a friendship that can be competitive and dysfunctional. And both focus on the creative process of writing as well as the strains on childhood friendships when people grow up and apart. I loved Ferrante’s series. I liked this novel, but I might have liked it […]

Fairy tales don’t always have a happy ending

Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

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I have mixed feelings about Kristin Hannah. Sometimes, I like her stuff (The Great Alone), sometimes I can’t stand it (Comfort & Joy), and sometimes I’m in the middle (The Women). I think this one falls squarely in the middle, too. Just before Christmas, Evan Whitson, the family patriarch, falls ill and dies. On his deathbed, he extracts a promise from his daughters – award-winning photographer and wanderer Nina and the stalwart, type-A Meredith – to really learn about their mother, the cold and distant […]

Eat the Rich

The Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson

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This book was INSANE. I saw this somewhere on my Facebook feed… someone posted they liked it, didn’t want to give any spoilers, and so I just put it on my TBR list and didn’t read the blurb. I was looking for something quick and easy Sunday morning, and this was available from the library, so in to the Kindle it went. I read this book in maybe two hours. Holy shit, is all I have to say. The long and short of the story […]

“I’ve started to think of Earth as a wax cylinder; the sun the needle, laid on the land and drawing out the day’s music—the sound of people arguing, cooking, laughing, singing, moaning, crying, flirting. And behind that, a silent sweep of millions of sleeping people, washing across the Earth like static.”

The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck

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In a “hook-and-chain” couplet structure, Shattuck meanders back and forth across three centuries in New England with six pairs of stories exploring themes that rhyme. This collection starts off pretty slow and gentle, and for the most part stays that way, telling the stories of ordinary people and mostly ordinary happenings. As such, I found myself quite surprised about halfway through about how thoroughly I had been sucked in, and how much I was enjoying myself. Part of what sets this collection of stories apart […]

Imagination is real

The Book Censor’s Library: A Novel by Bothayna Al-Essa

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This is a wonderful book about imagination, books, libraries, and censorship. It’s a love song to some literary classics and a picture of a dystopian not-too-distant future where most literature is banned and burned. How far would you go to preserve the ideas and literary creations that have formed us? What is worth saving? What price would you pay? The characters in this book have no names; rather they have titles or descriptors. The main character is the Book Censor, a man who wants only […]



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