Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Blackout. The Whale has eaten me. I repeat the Whale has eaten me and I am now dead. #CBRBINGO – White Whale

Possession by A.S. Byatt

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This review will not be long, for this book has defeated me, and in such a way that I don’t overly feel like enumerating what went wrong here. The short answer is most likely that I’m just not the right reader for this book (and this author, which is why I’ve deleted The Children’s Book from my TBR). I bought this ages ago, probably over a decade, and finally gave it a try about six years ago. I got 48 pages in before I said I’d […]

Life has thrown a lot at me recently, so here are all the reviews I forgot to write!

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The Miraculous by Jess Redman

The Tea Dragon Festival by K. O'Neill

An Exchange of Gifts by Anne McCaffrey

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

The Sandman: Act I by Neil Gaiman

The Princess Spy by Larry Loftis

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The Bear and the Nightingale By Katherine Arden (Warning – the review of this book contains f-bombs!) I know this was supposed to be based on a fairy tale, and some parts seemed very fairy tale-like (especially the story the nanny told toward the beginning with the girls in the snow) but I did not correlate them to any story I already knew.  I appreciated the involvement of the Russian household spirits, and how the village did quite well combining their religion and their culture […]

Beautiful, thoughtful, heartbreaking

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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My white whale!  I have been trying and failing to read Atonement for about three years, so I am excited to say that not only have I finished it, but I really enjoyed it! The other times I have started reading, I have remained stuck in the book’s opening section, which covers the course of one summer day in the 1935 at the country house of the Tallis family. The Tallis’ youngest child, Briony, is a precocious creative sort who has written a play she […]

A Whale Would Not Be the Strangest Thing in the Endless Universe – It Gets Stranger

The Dreaming, Volume 1: Pathways and Emanations by Simon Spurrier

The Dreaming, Volume 2: Empty Shells by Simon Spurrier

The Dreaming, Volume. 3: One Magic Movement by Simon Spurrier

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  It’s The Sandman! I love The Sandman. How did I end up putting a Sandman based property on my White Whale list? I guess The Dreaming ended up a bit on the White Whale side for two reasons: 1) When I read the original Sandman series about ten years ago, I binge read them over a few nights. This helped to both keep my immersion in the series and follow the plot. The original could be confusing as all hell at times. 2) I […]

White Whale Finally Caught (there’s another right behind it)

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

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White Whale: My brother has been telling me to read these books for two years now! THIS was actually the last book I had on my backlog of reviews, I swear, and it’s not even in the backlog–I just finished it! This definitely gets categorized on the (one of many) white whale novels shelf, because I read the first book over two years ago on the advice of my brother, and then promptly decided since I didn’t need to read the next one right away (no obvious […]

“Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

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When thinking about my White Whale pick for Bingo this year I was coming up short. Then the Go Fug Yourself Book Club on Goodreads voted to read A Room with a View for October and I found my whale. Many classics are heavy reads, but I found A Room with a View to be refreshingly light on the whole with some lively characters. It’s an accessible story, funny, biting, poignant, wistful, romantic. It’s a study of (mostly) good people, who love one another as […]



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