Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Lost Paradise or Far Flung Trailer Park

The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific by Brandon Presser

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CBR16 Bingo – Bananas: A lot of people eat a lot of bananas across several centuries and a number of South Pacific islands. Also, this story is utterly bananas. Several centuries after the mutineers from the HMS Bounty settled Pitcairn Island, author Brandon Presser goes to visit this isolated place, where he tries to understand how the bloody and conflicted past has shaped the present day lives of the descendants. Considering how much I enjoy true crime and strange stories, it’s probably odd that I […]

The Unforgiving Desert

Journal of the Dead by Jason Kersten

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CBR16 Bingo – Fiasco: David and Raffi’s trip into Rattlesnake Canyon is an utter fiasco from start to finish. When authorities find Raffi Kodikian barely alive four days after he and his best friend David Coughlin got lost in an desert canyon, they make a grim discovery. Raffi claims to have stabbed David to death in a mercy killing, but the police suspect the truth may be darker. It was awkward on my way out of the library with this book, because another patron, intrigued […]

Keeping Hope in the Jungle

Sisters Under the Rising Sun by Heather Morris

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The passengers of the Vyner Brooke are pitched from the frying pan to the fire when the ship upon which they have been fleeing the Japanese invasion of Singapore is sunk off the shores of Indonesia. The women and children, musician Norah Chambers and nurse Nesta James among them, must survive in jungle camps until the end of the war. I am continuing my informal journey through the Pacific theatre of World War 2 with Sisters Under the Rising Sun, which chronicles the lives of a […]

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

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After graduating from college, Chris McCandless vanished from his former life and took to the road. The next that his family heard about him was several years later, when he was discovered to have starved to death in the remote Alaskan wilderness. I love Krakauer’s writing, astute and lyrical, and the way he tells this story makes me feel like I’m peering into the abyss of mortality he describes encountering on his ascent of Devils Thumb. Into Thin Air is one of my favorite books […]

The Past is a Different Country

Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age by Reid Mitenbuler

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Peter Freuchen first rose to prominence as an Arctic explorer in the early twentieth century, but during his long adventurous life he wore many other hats, becoming a best-selling author, working in Hollywood, and being imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp for being a member of the resistance. I like exploration stories. They introduce you to an old world that no longer exists, they have the kinds of details that boggle the mind, and are usually populated with exactly the eccentric kinds of people you’d […]

Fever Dream on the Northern Atlantic

The Last One by Will Dean

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Her trip on the luxury ocean liner RMS Atlantica is supposed to be the vacation of a lifetime, but when Caz wakes up to find that every other person on the ship seems to have vanished, it becomes a waking nightmare instead. It’s a good thing I went on my first cruise before I read this book. Partly because it makes it easier to visualize the setting, and partly I probably would have been more anxious about wandering around its deserted decks or corridors late […]



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