Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Wanderlustful

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Lawyer by day, voracious reader by night. So many books, so little time!

Wanderlustful's Reviews:

Find yourself in the rhythm and the ride

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

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In the late 1960s, a narrator who very closely resembles author Robert M. Pirsig embarks on a summer motorcycle trip with his adolescent son and some friends, traveling from their home in Minneapolis to San Francisco. Twinned with descriptions of their physical journey across the great plains is Pirsig’s descriptions of his philosophical journey, his theory of life as analogized through his relationship with his motorcycle. For the narrator/author, the physical act of motorcycle maintenance, the attention to detail, the willingness to devote time and […]

Build back better

Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin

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Gretchen Rubin is a former lawyer who left the legal world for the literary one- she started with Happier, which spawned a podcast of the same name that she co-hosts with her sister, and an expanding line of related self-help-y books, including this one. This was the first of her books that I’ve read, although I listen to the podcast frequently (so I had pretty solid expectation for what I was getting into). Rubin’s overarching thesis for this book is how we get ourselves to […]

History is written by the victors

The Histories by Herodotus

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Here is the long and storied background to how this brick of a book has been in my possession, unread, for 20 years: I picked up The Histories from the sale rack at A&B sound when I was a romantic undergrad student, smitten by Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, in which The Histories plays a supporting role (it is the book that Ralph Fiennes’ character carries with him everywhere and turns into a journal, pasting in paintings that Kirstin Scott Thompson’s character made of the […]

Inoffensive early entry from Liane Moriarty

The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty

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Can Liane Moriarty write a bad novel? Of all of hers that I’ve read, this was maybe the weakest and it was still solid. It follows a hypnotherapist, Ellen O’Farrell, as she begins a romance with a single-father widower, Patrick. Patrick discloses that he has a stalker, an ex-girlfriend named Saskia, who isn’t dangerous but does seem to be always there. Although ostensibly a love story (hence the name), the story doesn’t focus as much on the romance between Patrick and Ellen as on the […]

Solid entry in the Tempe Brennan series

Fatal Voyage by Kathy Reichs

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Up in the mountains of North Carolina, where the last towns nestle into the Appalachian wilderness, a commercial airliner crashes. Kathy Reichs’ long time heroine, forensic pathologist Temperance ‘Tempe’ Brennan, is called in to assist with identifying remains. As the police try to determine the source of the crash, Tempe uncovers a foot that doesn’t appear to belong to anyone on the flight manifest- leading her to a whole different investigation. Rounding out the mystery with some love story tension is the appearance on the […]

A Swedish Forrest Gump

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

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Allan Karlsson is about to turn 100 years old and he is bored. He’s stuck in a nursing home which has a bunch of very annoying rules and not nearly the excitement he has become accustomed to. With very little in the way of plans, but considerable luck- and true to the book’s title- Karlsson climbs out of the window and into an adventure. The events snowball from there to include theft, inadvertent murder, car crashes, an escaped elephant and a love story- and that’s […]



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