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:

Making the Sausage – Hollywood Style

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

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cbr17bingo Arts Schulberg, the son of a successful Hollywood producer, is probably best known for his screenplays (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd), but he started as a novelist with What Makes Sammy Run?, about a Hollywood publicist. This book follows about ten years later, and is the thinly fictionalized story of an ill-fated trip Schulberg made with F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Dartmouth.  Fitzgerald was nearing the end of his life and was trying to scrape together cash by working on screenplays for […]

Quite a Grab Bag

Waiting for the Fear by Oguz Atay

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cbr17bingo Black A collection of stories from an unusual author, a Turkish writer who lived from 1934 to 1977.  Some of them are fables, some are mystical, and a few are more realistic.  For me, some resonated, and some were impenetrable.  And a few had a sly sense of humor. Like Not Yes Not No, which cracked me up.  A young man gets a job answering letters to a paper asking for personal advice (think Dear Abby).  M.C. writes in to state he has written […]

Settle Yourselves Down for a STORY.

The Knight of Maison-Rouge by Alexandre Dumas

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cbr17bingo Citizen How many times has The Three Musketeers been filmed?  Dumas knew how to tell a tale, even though he could be fairly verbose, at times.  But hey. when you get paid by volume, that makes sense. The Knight of Maison Rouge, the character named in the title, is a champion of Marie Antoinette, in that murky period in French history between the execution of her husband, Louis XVI, and her own.  The government consisted of various battling contingents of “citizens” each trying to […]

Death in the Pines

Trespasser by Paul Doiron

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CBR17 Work The thing to know about Maine is that the lower Atlantic coast bit is gorgeous.  Portland to Bar Harbor and all the little towns in between, at least in the summer?  There was a reason that all the money folk would spend the season here.  But go up the coast past Bar Harbor for a bit, and it’s a whole other state.  Still a few vacation homes, but a lot more hard-scrabble living, and there is nothing wrong with some road-kill venison. This […]

Whisper Sweet Nothings About Chopin All Day Long

The Unforgivable and Other Writings by Cristina Campo

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This collection of short stories was the product of an unusual author.  Campo, born in Italy in 1923, had been a sickly child (heart condition) and grew up secluded by her wealthy family in a villa in Tuscany.  In the 1960s, she moved to Rome, and lived in a convent for long periods of time until her untimely death in 1977. Some of her earlier work borders a little too closely to twee for my taste, and I do not share her enthusiasm for Catholic […]

Must Confess, Arty People Are Not My Tribe.

Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley

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Told alternately in the present and the past, Late in the Day follows the lives of two arty and fairly wealthy London couples, Alex and Christine, and Zachary and Lydia.  The quartet turns into a trio in no time with the sudden death of Zachary from a heart attack.  Christine is a fairly well-known artist, and her husband Alex a primary school headmaster, having given up an earlier attempt to become a writer.  Lydia has been Christine’s closest friend from their childhood days, and Zach […]



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