Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The sun is up, the skies are blue, and murder is in the air.”

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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A few years ago, it felt like everyone and their neighbor were reading The Thursday Murder Club. I was intrigued but hadn’t pulled the proverbial trigger. But here we are and the time has arrived for me to dig in to the story of a group of friends in a retirement village who investigate cold cases for fun, and the new member they invite into their ranks, and the murder that happens that lets them jump into their first in real time crime solving.    This was just the right book to break a two-month reading slump. It […]

“Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.”

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

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I’m nearly a decade late to The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. It has been on my to read list since 2016 and got pushed to the top tier of the pile last year for the Read Harder challenge (as it does take place in a big way in a bookstore). Then I never got to it but seeing that there was a movie adaptation out I decided to get my proverbial act together and dig into the story.   The book tells […]

A Self-Care Treat for Me

The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay & Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's novel to film by Emma Thompson

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The 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is maybe my favorite movie adaptation ever and is certainly in my top five movies of all time. I will watch it when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I’m wistful, when I’m tired. It makes my heart happy and is one of my go to tools in the self-care toolbox. While I have read many Austen related books in my time with Cannonball I had never poked around into books about the movie adaptations. Then in […]

How does this child have the energy to do so many high-stakes things?!

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

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Since its release in 1995, there has been a movie adaptation and a TV adaptation of The Golden Compass (originally titled Northern Lights outside of North America), so I’m guessing that we all have a general understanding of the plot, but here is a brief overview. Lyra is a brash, headstrong, and fearless girl. She and her daemon Pan (a physical manifestation of the soul in the world Lyra is from) live at Jordan College in Oxford under the care of the Scholars of the college where she […]

the Sanderson sisters are still my favorite witchy siblings, but the Owens family are not messing around!

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

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Lookout y’all, it’s re-read time! Alice Hoffman used to be a favorite author of mine; we slowly went our separate ways after The Museum of Extraordinary Things. There was no big breakup; we just grew apart. We wanted different things. The separation was so slow and gentle that I forgot that she was an author that I really liked, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a new prequal to Practical Magic hitting the shelves, oh wait, there already was a prequal? This […]

I’m just here for Lisbeth

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was my Mocha Girls Read book club pick for May with the theme of Scandanavian Mystery. When the original book came out, I was aware of the hype but opted for the film adaptations. I enjoy all incarnations, so I figured the novel would grip me. Instead, I found myself getting a bit impatient with the plot when it didn’t focus on the titular “The Girl”. The story follows a journalist named Mikael Blomkvist who has been hired by […]



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