Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Archives for December 2021

The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer (1948)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

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One of my pseudo-white whales I realized once I got going with it and thought back on my orientation toward this novel. It’s on the MLA top 100, so I bought it once long ago and began reading it and stopped not that far into it. I mentioned this once to a grad school colleague and got yelled at, and didn’t know why or like that. It was my first understanding of that kind of passion that Mailer sometimes inspired in people. He obviously has […]

The dogs were the best part

Killing Trail by Margaret Mizushima

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I was looking for an audio book for a road trip when I found Killing Trail (2015) by Margaret Mizushima. I thought it was the perfect book for me: a suspenseful mystery set in a small Colorado town, and it’s all about police dogs! Killing Trail is book 1 of 7 in the “Timber Creek K-9 mysteries” series. Mattie Cobb has just recently returned from the training where she obtained Timber Creek’s first police dog. Her dog, Robo, is a highly trained German shepherd who is always eager to […]

Adventures in ghost hunting

Ghost Squad by Claribel A. Ortega

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I read Ghost Squad by Claribel A. Ortega for our Young at Heart Cannon book club. I am so glad this book came into my life. 2022 has been plagued with a few reading slumps from the pandemic. However, this middle-grade book got me back into the groove. I read the audiobook, which I highly recommend. The supernatural mystery follows two friends, Lucely and Syd, who live in St. Augustine, Florida. Lucely is Dominican-American and can see her ghost relatives. She speaks to their spirits […]

The struggle between who you are and who you want to be

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was another Mocha Girls Read pick. I definitely would not have read it without the book club impetus. To no surprise, as indicated by this annual onslaught of reviews, I procrastinated reading it. I ended up reading most of it in one day. It was well worth the time and exceeded my expectations. The novel centers on two Black twin sisters who run away from a small Black community.  The town prides itself on being a close-knit town for […]

Lost in The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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The Midnight Library by Matt Haig has an intriguing premise of exploring potential lives. The main character Nora arrives in a mysterious library after trying to commit suicide. She is depressed and the loss of her cat sends her over the edge. The book introduces a type of time travel where Nora experiences the what-if situations from her life. She picks a book on the shelf and becomes transported into a new life where she makes a different choice. What if she stayed in her […]

A pretty good read for the holidays

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

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The Delaneys are a seemingly normal family with four grown up kids and a mum and dad who have just sold up the family business and retired. That is, until mum goes missing. Family secrets start emerging, dad looks guilty, and the children grapple with whose side they’re going to take. The tension builds nicely from the very beginning (making it a real page turner), with two timelines running side by side – the present, in which mum has disappeared and the past, starting around […]



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