Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Look at God looking at you…and smiling.” -de Mello

Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life by James Martin

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I bought this book last fall at a Jesuit retreat center. The only thing better than lakeside solitude is lakeside solitude with its own bookstore. Mostly, I picked this book for the cute cover. Additional bonus: Richard Rohr of recent enneagram fame and Stephen Colbert wrote the blurbs on the back. In this book, joy is defined as “happiness in God…a deep-seated result of one’s connection to God.” A lot of the book is about how it’s ok for believers to enjoy life. Specifically, how […]

A Grounded Story of Faith and Doubt and…Aliens

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Author Mary Doria Russell is a paleoanthrolpolgist, as well as an adherent to Judaism. However, she grew up Catholic, renounced her faith as a teenager, and took up her current faith when she had children and was trying to figure out what she wanted to pass on to her children. Her professional and spiritual background put her in an interesting position to create a cerebral, unique work of speculative science fiction. The Sparrow is equally engaging and horrifying. I wanted to put it down, but I […]

An ambitious, delightful but very messy Shakespeare murder mystery

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This Shakespearean “who-dun-it” is a delightful contribution to this particular genre of historical mystery. It is a glorious mash-up of DaVinci Code-like code-breaking and world-hopping combined with the inexhaustible debate over the disputed authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and of course, the identity of Shakespeare himself. The chapters jump back and forth between the period of Shakespeare and the present-day, where people within the literary, academic and theater worlds are dying like Shakespeare’s characters, and no one has a clue who the bad guy is, including […]



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