Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Merryn's Reviews:

Things are different in Wales

Ivon by Michael Aylwin

Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

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CBRBingo – Sportsball and People As I read Ivon, I couldn’t help thinking that this would be a much better book if Jasper Fforde had written it.  Fforde is a master of taking a crazy premise and populating it with such skillfully drawn living breathing humans that the setting becomes real. This is Aylwin’s first novel, and he isn’t there yet. In the world of Ivon, sport is everything.  Set in our future, after a series of pandemics that killed off all but the fittest, almost all of humanity […]

The Rain Wild Chronicles – Ragtag band of misfits and dragons find a home

The Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb

Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb

City of Dragons by Robin Hobb

Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb

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  CBR13 Bingo (in order) – Travel, The Wilds, Cityscape, Home I’ve read the other books in Robin Hobbs interlinked series many times, and the Farseer Trilogy is one of my favourite alltime reads.  But for some reason I’d passed over the Rain Wild Chronicles until now.  Maybe I’d heard it was a weaker link in the chain?  If so, I heard right.  The characters lack the depth and humanity I expect from Hobb, and were too neatly paired off by the series end.  Nothing […]

Triplets struggle against lifelong stereotypes

Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty

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CBR13bingo: Libations I read this book after trawling through my extensive unread collection on my Kindle looking for something with food on the cover for Bingo.  It was an easy enjoyable read.  A bit like a well-made cupcake. It’s a very Liane Moriarty book, about three sisters, triplets, struggling to break out of the stereotypes they have been cast in since their youth.  There’s the driven one, the wild one, the ditzy one.  They all live in picturesque housing that would look great on TV, […]

Where is la joie de vivre?

Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roche

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CBR13bingo – Book Club; My local book club is reading classics this year, and our July read is Jules et Jim, the source material for the French New Wave movie Jules and Jim. The introduction and afterword of my edition of this book, and other reviews, told me that it is a celebration of a deep friendship between Jules and Jim and a love triangle where “all parties are free and equal, always loyal to one another”. That what “only counts for the three of […]

The future is an intricately beautiful machine

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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CBR13bingo: Machinery Thaniel works as a telegraphist for the Home Office, a master of the machine.  He’d rather be playing the piano, but his civil service salary allows him to support his widowed sister and nephews and pays the rent for his sad little room in a boarding house on the bank of the Thames. Mori made the exquisitely beautiful watch that was left on Thaniel’s bed in a velvet box.  The watch that saved Thaniel’s life, and brought both of them under suspicion of […]

A foundation for something more engaging

Troy by Stephen Fry

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Bingo: Mythic The story of the fall of Troy is baked into Western culture. As I read this book I was reminded of so many other cultural artefacts built on the same foundation. In my head I could hear Sinead O’Connor wailing “there is no other Troy for you to burn”.  I remembered reading The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri Tepper in my teens, where the women of this future dystopia ritually perform Iphigenia at Ilium each year, a reminder of the price that men’s […]



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