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:

Now You Know Who to Blame for These Earworms

Public Cowboy #1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry by Holly George-Warren

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Well, ‘tis the time of the year for quick reviews, because I’ve got a backlog I want to get in before the end of the year. This book covers (in exhaustive detail) Autry’s amazing career as a performer.  The Angels (baseball), radio and TV station ownerships, and his namesake museum on Los Angeles are barely mentioned.  Autry went, in the 1920’s, from live performances at rodeos to songwriting to radio to the movies to TV, successfully managing each field with pretty minimal skills as a […]

Comfy? Good. Settle down. Let Me Tell You a Story.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

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CBR15  Passport California There were two types of literary genre that were particularly popular in the 1950s.  One was Biblical tales, and the other was multi-generational drama, particularly set in the West.  Examples of the first type are plentiful.  The Silver Chalice, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and Quo Vadis, to name a few.  The second type was exemplified by novels such as Giant and Sometimes a Great Notion.  One thing all these novels had in common was that they were made into prestigious, best-selling movies.  […]

Peel Me a Grape

The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and OBSESSION by Adam Leith Gollner

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CBR15 Passport Borneo Way back in my college days (so many decades ago!) there was this guy in our dorm who would only eat fruit and nuts that had fallen from a tree on their own.  (Oddly enough, it seems as though weed also fell off the plant on its own.  Who knew.)  So, Daniel, I have no idea whatever happened to you, but cheers. This book is dedicated to fruitarians, folks who, quite often, eat nothing but.  And we aren’t talking about apples and […]

Weird casting, but OK.

The Mudlark by Theodore Bonnet

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So I didn’t expect this book to be what it was.  I knew it had been made into a movie back aways, with Irene Dunne as Queen Victoria (ahahaha!) and thought it was something along the lines of the Shirley Temple epic, The Little Princess, but it was definitely not that, and actually not at all a children’s book,. A definition first.  A mudlark was a child who earned his or her keep by scavenging through the “mud” on the banks of the Thames for […]

Yeah, I Don’t Know

Keeper of Enchanted Rooms by Charlie N. Holmberg

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There was a lot I liked about this, but somehow, it kept falling into Uncanny Valley territory for me. Hulda Larkin, a very self-possessed young woman, is in the employment of BIKER (Boston Institute for the Keeping of Enchanted Rooms – an acronym that consistently threw me off). It is her job to subdue enchanted homes into domesticity, in order to preserve their historical magical properties.  In the year 1846, she has been sent to an isolated mansion on a remote island in Rhode Island.  […]

As They Say, When in Rome. . . No, Wait, Actually Don’t

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

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cbr15 bingo Sex cbr15 passport Rome   You know what would have really helped me make sense of all this would have been a family tree.  This was worse than Russian novels, where everyone has at least four names and a nickname.  But these guys changed names whenever they felt like it, used a limited set to choose from (Nero?  Oh, not THAT Nero), divorced and hooked up depending on the politics of the moment, and let’s not even get into the suicides, forced and […]



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