Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It appears that 19th century soap opera adventure stories are my thing!

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

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Reviewer Note: In 2024, I started to read the free version of The Count of Monte Cristo that is available from Project Gutenberg (my go-to resource for novels in the public domain). After reading 200 pages, I couldn’t understand why I was so bored. This novel has more action than a Die Hard movie, yet I was struggling to stay interested. I decided to do some research into what’s considered the best translation of this novel, and I found recommendations for the edition translated by Robin […]

Adventure! True love! Sex with monkeys!

Candide by Voltaire

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CBR15 BINGO: Europe, because Voltaire, he is very French It’s been so long since I read Candide that I can’t remember whether I was in high school or college at the time, yet the refrain, “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” has been stuck in my head like a 1980s Mountain Dew commercial. So when I was looking for a good candidate for the Europe BINGO category, I thought, “Why not revisit Voltaire?” To sum up Candide, a young […]

“Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.”

The Three Musketeers (The d'Artagnan Romances, #1) by Alexandre Dumas

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Nobody told me this book would be funny! Well, in case you didn’t know it, this book is funny! I did know it would be ridiculously long, but I did the audiobook, and Bill Homewood was a very fun narrator, and it didn’t feel as long as it could have. For some reason, I’ve always thought this book would be boring, but it’s a swashbuckling adventure Romance, so in hindsight that was a weird opinion to have. Maybe because the cover looks boring, or I’m […]

Half Cannonball: Complete! With a bit of French fiction.

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I had the lucky opportunity to be in Paris for work and visited one of my favorite bookshops in the world, Shakespeare and Company, and came upon this little gem. This novel was compared to “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” which I had read with my book club and enjoyed, so I figured it was fate. I thought this was going to be more of a fluff book, but it actually took much darker turns that I anticipated. It was a very quick read, perfect […]



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