Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“the same thing that we’re always seeking when we travel: to get outside of ourselves and imagine new possibilities”

The Best American Travel Writing 2020 by Jason Wilson (editor)

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One of this year’s Read Harder tasks was to read a “Best _ Writing of the year” book for a topic and year of your choice. I had a couple ideas and went perusing through my library catalog to see what I could come up with. And then I saw The Best American Travel Writing 2020 edited by Jason Wilson and the absurdity of these pandemic years meant that this one won out. Consider me intrigued to know what won out in a year that […]

Romp Through Ancient History

Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs by Barbara Mertz

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Barbara Mertz was an Egyptologist and author; in addition to this non-fiction entry she has a mystery series under the pen name Elizabeth Peters, featuring an intrepid female Egyptologist crime solver. Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics is a quick historical romp through ancient Egypt, beginning at the beginning (the first pharaoh, Narmer, he of the stone palette trumpeting the unification of upper and lower Egypt that is taken as the usual start of ancient Egyptian history), through to Egypt becoming a vassal Roman state (fall of […]

“Dear diary, today I met a woman wearing too many buttons who does not understand what a metaphor is”

Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn

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CBR14 Bingo: Fonts (Meg’s whole livelihood involves lettering, fonts, and calligraphy. Also, this was the first book on my TBR I could think of when I saw the bingo prompt.) Meg Mackworth is known as “the Planner of Park Slope” and uses her hand lettering skills and creativity to design custom journals and planners for the rich and influential in New York City. Lately, she’s really feeling the pressure of all the work and suffering from a creative block – not exactly a good thing […]

Good Cop/Bad Cat

The Eloquent Scribe: The Sitehuti and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet Series Book 1 by T. Lee Harris

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Cbr14bingo Font The main character is an Egyptian scribe turned investigator The Eloquent Scribe is the first book in a mystery series set in ancient Egypt and features a pair of unlikely investigators — Sitehuti the junior scribe and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet (aka Neffi), the sacred cat of the Temple of Bastet in capital city Pi-Ramesses. While the “mystery” in this novel is pretty straight forward and not terribly hard to solve for the reader, the charm of the story is in the characters and the potential […]

Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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Cbr14Bingo – Font — While there’s a lot of talk of printing, printing errors, and handwriting in this book, I am mostly looking at this as a sober look at the facts we know about the life of Shakespeare with the dry wit and editorial selection prowess of Bill Bryson. This book looks at the history of Shakespeare, as a person, and tries to sort out the facts. What this means is that Bryson looks squarely at what we know for sure based on specific […]



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