Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam for layfolks

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin

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Every now and again, there’s a picture of David Tenant that pops up on social media where he’s taking a selfie at a con, and there’s some guy just next to him with his nose in his phone. The caption is almost always some suggestion of what the other guy is missing being that close to a celebrity and not knowing it.  Here’s my version of that, kind of. I kind of remember the final time I graduated that the Commencement speaker was referred to […]

Lots of cat pictures and cat things

Cat by Leila Jarbouai, Hannah Shaw, Phaidon

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This one I picked up for the cover. Cartoon style black cat curled up, title simply “Cat”. It’s an art book, over 200 pages of cats in painting, photograph, wood cut, and objects over time. Each page has an image and the museum description (although not always where the original currently lives). There’s almost a little bit of everything, from graffiti, to an Hermes scarf, to a Garfield strip (had to wait a while for that one) to Nyan-cat to Warhol and Doré to da […]

A Handful of Lanterns Are Probably Enough

The House of a Thousand Lanterns by Victoria Holt

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Jane Leslie never dreamt when she first heard of the House of a Thousand Lanterns that she might one day live there, or that it might end up being the death of her. This is another somewhat lackluster Victoria Holt gothic romance rescued by the quality of her writing and the strong main character. I did enjoy also going out to colonial Hong Kong, though you must take the attitudes of most of the characters with a grain of salt in regards to the custom […]

Between the Accident and the Incident

Curse of the Blumenthals by Phyllis Karas

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Three generations of journalist Phyllis Karas’s family are marked by two great tragedies – the car crash which killed six members of the family, and the murder committed by the first grandchild born after that accident hardly twenty years later. This is an interesting mash-up of a book – part family history, part true crime, and sometimes even a scrapbook. Karas dives into the crimes which impacted her family, whether they were those who committed them or the victims, studying how their effects rippled through […]

Humpty Doos and Swingles and Citrus History

Citrus: A World History by David J Mabberley

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Technically this is going to be a DNF, but not because I didn’t like it; I just ran out of time and library renewals. Citrus: A World History is an interesting cross between textbook and coffee table book. It’s got the pretty pictures, many from historical records, in combination with blocks of dense but detailed information about where citrus may have originated, different varieties that have appeared, and what people have done with them over a couple of millennia. There are sections on different eras, […]

The American Female Q

In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked by Jonna Méndez

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Jonna began her work at the CIA as a ‘career wife,’ supporting her husband’s job, but soon she started taking on bigger and important roles in the agency, for which she lived all over the world and eventually rose to the position of Chief of Disguise. Having read plenty about the CIA’s origins as the OG old boy’s club in which a lot of men threw ideas at a wall and hoped they’d stick during World War 2, this book was interesting to me for […]



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