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:

A Glimpse of a Sliding Doors Life for QEII

All the Queen's Corgis by Penny Junor

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When Queen Elizabeth II died in September, it was the end of an era that stretched back to my grandparents time. I’m not a monarchist but I did feel some sadness in her passing, and still have a hard time imagining the vast changes that her long life spanned through- world war II, independence of the UK’s colonies, the 50’s post-war austerity (and gender roles), the cold war, the Thatcher years, Charles and Diana’s divorce, the death of Diana, the birth of the internet, terrorist […]

Halloween Nora Roberts is not the best Nora Roberts

The Pagan Stone by Nora Roberts

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Halloween Nora! This one definitely felt more Halloween-y and thriller-focused than romance-focused. It’s the third in a trilogy and I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to have read any of the others to understand what’s going on here (you’ll ‘spoil’ the ending to the other two in that a) all of the characters survive until this third book; and b) you’ll know which of the 6 main characters couple off together- but frankly those aren’t real spoilers in the Nora Roberts world). […]

Your great vacation does not a book make

Poets and Pahlevans by Marcello Di Cintio

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Turns out I prescient in picking this up from my TBR pile, as not long after I started reading it, the Mahsa Amini story and related protests propelled Iran into the headlines again. Poets & Pahlevans is Marcello Di Cintio’s travelogue of his journeys through Iran in the early/mid 2000s (post-9/11 but still during the Bush years). He styles himself a romantic, driven by the twin ‘p’s of the title- poetry and wrestling, as well as a fascination with persian language and culture. Di Cintio […]

Serviceable mystery requiring some suspension of disbelief

Rage by Jonathan Kellerman

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Years ago I read a Faye Kellerman novel and hated it, which colored my expectations for this one (the two are married and both Faye and Jonathan write detective fiction). Despite my misgivings, this one was sitting on my shelf when I was looking for a Los Angeles setting, so into my reading rotation it went! (We had a fall trip to LA planned and I like to match my reading to the destination to build anticipation). Verdict: this was a serviceable mystery that had […]

Obnoxious and frustrating

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Taleb is an economist who fancies himself an outsider and disruptor, and this 400 page book is his long explanation of a fairly simple idea that he fancies himself as having come up with: that we don’t properly assess the risk of ‘unlikely’ events in our financial system. He characterizes patterns into two categories: those where we can accurately assess the outlying instances (ie: human height on a graph will never exceed a certain figure- it would be impossible- vs the gap between rich and […]

Grow where you’re planted (and support local!)

Food Artisans of Alberta by Karen Anderson

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I read this in slow 10 page increments each morning over a period of a few months, and it was a soul-satisfying read with my morning coffee. Karen Anderson is a former nurse with a passion for slow and local food, as well as Alberta history. She is attempting to create a culinary scene in the province that extends beyond the major cities (she was running food tours in the major cities), and this book is a step towards that goal, as well as trying […]



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