Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About elderberrywine

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Elder LOTR/Holmes fan girl/writer since forever.

elderberrywine's Reviews:

Life with (and without) Bunty

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

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A bleakly funny look at two generations of a British family, each shaped by the two world wars.  The reader bounces back and forth between the two, as one sees why the characters from the older generation act the way they do (i.e., the “behind the scenes” motivations).  But no matter which generation, it’s a hard-knock life to be sure, and disaster is always just around the corner.  Money is always tight, and rationing is for real.  And then we end up with the soul-draining […]

Let Me Drift Away…

The Child and the River by Henri Bosco

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Bosco, a French/Italian writer, was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times.  He wrote this novella in 1945 in Morocco, shortly before his return to France.  It is beautifully written, a pastorale so to speak, with definite undertones of Huckleberry Finn.  Pascalet, a young boy, runs away from his caretaker to the forbidden river, upon which he finds an old weathered boat.  Only meaning to rest in it, he finds himself adrift, and then after a brief but frightening squall, ends up becoming grounded on […]

A Blast from the Past

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

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I first read Lovecraft as a teen and was instantly smitten.  The Rats in the Wall?  OMG!  So creepy!  So it’s fun, lo these many years later, to read Lovecraft again, seeing a little more behind the curtain, as it were. But I was amused to find the setting of most of these sinister tales in this collection were in obscure bits of the mid-Atlantic states (not the standard setting of gothic tales of horror) such as upstate New York.  OK, I’ll give you Rip […]

It Is a Puzzlement

Our Philosopher by Gert Hofmann

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This was a slim and melancholy read, and I feel as if I am missing quite a bit of context.  The author is German, and although it was written in 1993, is set in the mid-1930s, and so mid-wars Germany.  There is nothing overtly political about the plot, but it is impossible to ignore what is looming ahead for Germany as well as the rest of the world. The setting is a quiet country town in the eastern German countryside, and the titular character is […]

So. You Like Mountaineering? Say No More.

Singing Waters by Ann Bridge

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So I picked this up from a library book sale because it had an old 1940s-ish binding (turns out publishing date is 1946) and I am a sucker for those.  There is an embossed scene of a mountainous valley on the cover, but the author is unknown to me.  We start off with a man with the Scandinavian name of Nils on a train wandering through the Italian pre-WWII countryside.  He ends up being paired in the dining car with an attractive fellow solo passenger, […]

All good in the hood

Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood by Danny Trejo with Donal Logue

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For a character actor known for tough guy roles, Danny Trejo has become surprisingly ubiquitous in Los Angeles.  Trejo’s Do-Nuts and Trejo’s Coffee shops are scattered about the city, and his voice is one of those who greets you at LAX.  And I’m all right with that.  LA could definitely do worse.  But the story of his life and how he got to this point would be laughed out of a writers’ table as just too improbable. He was in and out of most of […]



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