Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About esmemoria

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Eager to get back on the horse this year! In my walking around life, I miss my old, blind pug (the Ancient Mariner), help amazing college students become teachers, and tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: esmemoria's Quick Questions interview.)

esmemoria's Reviews:

Good Mix of Stories

The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 by S.A. Cosby, Ed.

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I read an S.A. Cosby book earlier this year and really liked it, so when I saw he edited The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 I grabbed it up. Cosby did a good job of picking the stories. Some of them are straightforward mysteries, some have ambiguous endings, some are gut-wrenching, like the last story in the collection which has a mother facing up to something terrible her teenaged son has done. Some stories are very dark, like the story where a young woman […]

Not as Good as Hyperbole and a Half

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

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I adored Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half blog, and especially resonated with her cartoons about depression. I picked up Solutions and Other Problems, her second book, in the hopes it would be just as funny and affecting. While it was both of these things at times, overall the book just wasn’t as strong as her previous work. The book is primarily about funny anecdotes, childhood stories, and wacky takes on things. To be honest, they felt kind of forced and not particularly humorous. They […]

Decent Mystery

A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny

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After wiping my emotional resources out with a book about the Native American genocide, I decided I needed a mystery to give myself a break from the emotional weight. Louise Penny’s A Rule Against Murder fit the bill. Quebec Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is celebrating his anniversary with his wife at a luxurious lodge edged by a lake deep in the forest. A family there is also having what appears to be an uncomfortable reunion. The Morrow matriarch is married to her second husband, and […]

American Holocaust

American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David Standard

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David Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World is a searing account of the Native American genocide perpetrated by Europeans in the Americas–Spain in South America and Anglo-Americans in the north. I felt so much grief and shame reading this book. The sheer destruction and rampant barbaric cruelty shown to the indigenous people of the Americas, and the staggering number of deaths is horrifying. Scholars generally agree that the indigenous population was somewhere between 75 to 100 million people, with 8 to 12 […]

Cozy, With a Touch of Christie

Marple: Twelve New Mysteries by Various

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I think I’ve read every Agatha Christie there is. I’m always hoping for an undiscovered book. So when I saw a collection of new Miss Marple stories I was quite excited. It turned out to be not a long-lost anthology, but stories written by modern authors as new Miss Marple mysteries. The mysteries featured stolen pearls, an academic murder, death on the high seas, a wedding interrupted by a poisoning, strange happenings on a languid vacation, a wealthy old duffer knocked off, a double murder, […]

An Apocalyptic Treat

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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I was three-quarters through Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven before the panic set in. Up until that point, I was engrossed in Mandel’s tale about an apocalyptic pandemic that killed 99% of those who contracted it, but it hadn’t gotten under my skin per se. In this world, only small groups of people survived the devastating and quick-killing flu, and all the features of civilization had disappeared: electricity, motorized transportation and airplanes, medical facilities, communications, and mechanized industry. As I read on, Mandel’s detailed […]



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