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:

Less really is more

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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What a fun ride! After my last award winning read turned  out to be a letdown (The Space Between), I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Greer’s novel.  Less focuses on Arthur Less, a mediocre writer having professional and personal difficulties- his publisher and his long-time boyfriend have both dumped him.  As the boyfriend’s wedding to someone else approaches, Arthur panics- he doesn’t want to attend the wedding but he doesn’t want to refuse the invite as it would be admitting that he […]

Thoughtful meditation on science, faith and family

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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Yaa Gyasi is best known for her critically acclaimed first novel, Homegoing.  Unlike Homegoing, which I gather has a broad sweep in terms in geography and time (its in my TBR pile!), Transcendent Kingdom is narrowly focused on one woman, Gifty, in her adolescent to early adult years.  Although the scope of the novel expands a little to include Gifty’s immediate family and a few friends, the novel remains focused on her experiences with these additional cast members- we see them through her eyes. We […]

Fact to the future

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

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Factfulness sounds like a word that Stephen Colbert invented, a companion word to ‘truthiness’.  It is actually the late Hans Rosling’s non-fiction bestseller that uses stats to prove how the world is much better than we often think it is.  Rosling was a Swedish physician who spent a number of years working in remote and impoverished communities, so you might suppose him to have a grim outlook on society and our ‘progress’.  This is not the case- he is ever-optimistic and he has the graph […]

So much more than fly over country

Prairie by Candace Savage

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Everyone dreams of picking up and moving to a beach town, or a mountain town or a big city.  To the extent that anyone mentions the Prairies at all, it often seems to be as a place to escape (Hillbilly Elegy) or pass through on the way to somewhere better, more interesting and more picturesque- the prairies are literal and metaphorical ‘fly-over country’.  I grew up on the prairies’ edge (the beautiful, gently rolling hills of the aspen parkland) and technically still live there (this […]

Thoughtful, history-full memoir

Forgiveness by Mark Sakamoto

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Mark Sakamoto’s 2014 Canadian bestseller has been on my to-read list for a while.  Forgiveness is a sort-of-memoir, focusing heavily on his family background.  It begins with the stories of his grandparents and their opposing experiences in WWII. His maternal grandfather, Ralph MacLean, is of Scottish background and grows up in adverse circumstances (poverty, abusive father) on a small island off Canada’s east coast.  When WWII is declared, Ralph sees joining the military as his opportunity for a better life- unfortunately he’s sent to Hong […]

Gloriously weird

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are just as weird as I remembered.  It was also a lot of fun. I had a good memory of the basic story going in: Alice chases a talking white rabbit who is holding a pocket watch and then falls down a rabbit hole; she eats and drinks things that are suspiciously labelled and make her grow larger or smaller; and she meets a cast of weird characters (Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen, a talking caterpillar, a mad hatter). All of […]



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