Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Anti-colonial historical fantasy

Aicha by Soraya Bouazzaoui

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I had such high hopes for Aicha because I love angry women, mythology, and historical fiction, so this sounded like it’d be exactly my jam. Unfortunately all those expectations fell flat. I wouldn’t say this is a bad book, and there were elements I enjoyed, I just don’t know that I’d say I enjoyed the book as a whole. Aicha is about the youngest daughter of a weapons smith, who is also a rebel, and how she also fights for her people’s liberation. But inside […]

Eating some delicious bugs and solving a mystery

Booker the Library Bat Volume 1: The New Guard by Jess Brallier

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Booker is a library bat. This means, like the real bats of the Joanine Library in Portugal (which eat around 500 bugs per bat per night, keeping the books safe from book eating bugs) he protects the books in the library he lives in. On his first night as a guard, with three old-timers (my favorite is Rocco who uses gel in his fur but they are all adorable), he decides to check out the library to get the lay of the land. That night […]

[got me] to a nunnery!

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Heloise & Abelard: A New Biography by James Burge

The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy's Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici by Elizabeth Lev

Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love by Myriam Cyr

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I thought I was going to need some time to recover from the exquisite The Everlasting, but really it flung me head-first into a literal rabbit-hole. A warren. An abbey. A nunnery, if you will. Also- The Atlantic just posted a list of books that were done dirty by pandemic releases, and OF COURE The Everlasting resides within those vaulted halls. I was immediately drawn to Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici after she was mentioned several times in The Everlasting. A distant relative of her spots her likeness in the […]

When a lizard appears

The Lizard by Jose Saramago

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I honestly have no idea what the point of the story, The Lizard was. The art of J. Borges never felt fleshed out and the story presented by Jose Saramago seems to have no point to it. Perhaps it is the way Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor translated the text and therefore, the original language to English might not flow nicely to my ears. Perhaps it was just something deeper in the story I was missing as I  was too focused on the surface part […]



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