Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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

Wanderlustful's Reviews:

This is why we can’t have nice things

Moneyland by Oliver Bullough

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Oliver Bullough starts off this non-fiction journey into offshore tax enclaves by walking the reader through the opulent mansion that the former Ukrainian president built with his stolen money and it is a damning introduction to the harm wrought by offshore money. Bullough’s thesis is that offshore money harms everyone- not just developing nations where corruption seems most apparent, but also developed countries who miss out on significant tax revenue and suffer increasing inequality when such corruption is allowed to flourish.  He traces the global […]

A poignant, salty heroine

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

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Set in the small town of Crosby, Maine, Olive Kitteridge is a collection of short stories that occasionally feature and always reference, at least in some small way, the titular main character. Olive is practical, blunt and opinionated but not introspective regarding her own feelings. She often flouts social niceties and seems incapable of apologizing . Despite this, she is not unlikeable- she is very human, and Strout gives the reader enough backstory and detail on Olive so that we can see her emotions even […]

The deadliest little village in the Eastern Townships

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

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The Cruelest Month is the third installment in the Inspector Gamanche detective novel series. Like the prior two novels, The Cruelest Month is also set in the Stars Hollow-esque Eastern Township village of Three Pines. Gamanche is called in after one of the village inhabitants, Madeleine Favreau, drops dead in the middle of a séance that a group of villagers were holding in the old Hadley house up on the hill. Although Madeleine had a bad heart, someone slipped her a dose of ephedrine to […]

If Get Out and Midsommer Had a Book Baby

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

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On its surface, this novel is about an unnamed twenty or thirty something narrator traveling with her boyfriend, Jake, to his parents’ remote family farm for a first ‘meet the parents’ dinner. As the two are driving there, our protagonist begins to have doubts about the relationship (“I’m thinking of ending things”) but ultimately decides she can’t say anything until they’re back home in the city. Once they arrive at Jake’s parents, everything starts to shift in vaguely unsettling ways- dead animals frozen and stacked […]

A screenplay that would be better as a movie

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

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A novel in screenplay format, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown focuses on aspiring actor Willis Wu. Most of the action takes place in the ‘interior chinatown’ set/apartment building in San Francisco. Wu has a small part in a police procedural, Black and White, that films in the restaurant on the ground floor. When filming is over, Wu, along with his parents and other cast members, lives in the small apartments above the restaurant. The plot follows Wu as he tries to climb the acting ladder from […]

River of words where I couldn’t catch the wave

River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks was a well-known neurologist best known for his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The River of Consciousness is a posthumously published collection of essays (many previously published) all roughly related to consciousness. I say roughly as they span topics ranging from the mental lives of plants and worms to Freud’s early career flirting with neurology to the fallible nature of our memories. I had high expectations for this, my first Oliver Sacks read.  Sadly, those expectations did not […]



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