Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence, my therapist once said.”

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

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Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A book set on vacation   Official plot summary (because it’s better than anything I could come up with): Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.   Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.   It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor […]

I think y’all are nuts!

The Last of the Giants: An Ultra Running Graphic Novel by Doug Mayer

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Why would anyone in their right mind want to do a 200-mile marathon? Something that would take you at least 6 days to finish? A trek that isn’t just in the “sweet, wide open mid-west of the country,” but in the Italian Alps? Well, I did say their right mind. The Last of the Giants: An Ultra Running Graphic Novel by Doug Mayer is based on Mayer’s own experiences as someone who has been on several extreme hikes. As I read via an online reader […]

“The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, more than 7000 Athenian prisoners of war are left to rot in Syracuse’s quarries – except a select few whom unemployed Syracusan potters Lampo and Gelon decide will be perfect to mount a pair of plays by the great tragic playwright Euripides. You might have to reread that premise. It’s a pretty whacky one, though some mild trawling of Wikipedia later revealed to me that allegedly some Athenian prisoners in Sicily did buy their freedom by reciting Euripides […]

There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen

The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

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This was a book club selection for me – while it definitely is the kind of thing I enjoy (hello, Kate Morton novels), this one wouldn’t have been on my radar at all. The novel alternates chapters between Sara, a chef in Philadelphia with a failed restaurant and a failed marriage, and her great-grandmother Serafina, a young mother in early 20th century Sicily (spanning 1908-1925 to be exact). Sara’s beloved great-aunt Rosie has died and part of her last will is to send Sara off […]

“Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?”

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

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When Lucrezia, the third daughter of the Duke of Florence, is wed to Alfonso d’Este, she’s not sure what to expect – but whatever it was, it was certainly not that he was going to want her dead before they’d been married a year. I haven’t read Maggie O’Farrell’s work before, but she’s been on my radar after the success of Hamnet, and so when I saw The Marriage Portrait offered as a ‘lucky day’ loan from my library, I snapped it up. Hurrah for […]

The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind small

Zanzara by Gloria Vitanza Basile

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Born in poverty and raised in a squalid orphanage, Phaedra’s life transforms completely when her identity as a prince’s illegitimate daughter is revealed, vaunting her into the lap of luxury. But she has a long, tough path to tread still before she will reach her happy ending. I really, really love the crazy bloody bodice rippers of the 1970s and 80s. They are always wild and adventurous, often with a strong historical grounding, and take you careening through the kind of heroine’s journey that leave […]



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