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:

Underwhelming prize winner

The Time in Between by David Bergen

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Charles Boatman, an aging Vietnam veteran, returns to Vietnam to come to terms with his time as an American soldier in the Vietnam war.  When Charles disappears, his 27 year old daughter, Ada, and 25 year old son, Jon, make the trip themselves to try and find answers.  The novel flits back and forth between Charles’ story and Ada’s.  With Charles we get some of the fairly predictable elements for a Vietnam war novel- his time in Vietnam as young man, his marriage and how […]

Hemingway is jerk

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

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Last week the BF and I did a Paris-themed date night from the claustrophobic comfort of our condo.  I made a playlist with Edith Piaf, cracked a bottle of wine and put a Youtube tour of the Louvre on in the background.  I also started reading A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoir of his Paris years in the 20’s- I’d been saving it for my next physical trip to the City of Lights, but as that trip might be years out, I thought I’d indulge in […]

Evolution of a Screwball Comedy

The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder

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I am continuing my dive through the plays that once belonged to my parents, former theatre nerds and aspiring stage actors, and the most interesting part is discovering that a lot of these plays (even ones I’ve never heard of) have been Broadway hits or even Hollywood Oscar winners (see: Butterflies are Free). The Matchmaker has a long and winding history in theatre and film- in 1938 it was published as a re-write of several earlier (1835, 1842, 1938) comedies, under the title “The Merchant […]

A Less Charismatic Malcolm Gladwell

Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter

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Published in 2013, Drunk Tank Pink feels like an attempt to capitalize on the same popular science wave that brought us Malcolm Gladwell and Freakonomics.  Like the former, Alter summarizes other people’s research for his own conclusions, without giving real credit to the researchers whose work he uses as a jumping off point.  In other sins (that may not be his fault- see my own delay in reading this book, which has collected dust on my shelves since I bought it back in 2013), he […]

Are you Longing for some Longing?

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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This was one of Faintingviolet’s top reads of 2019, and I also desperately wanted to watch the Hulu show, especially after Dustin’s review.  They were both right- this book was great. If you haven’t seen the Hulu trailer, this is a teenage/college age lovestory, set first in Sligo, northwest Ireland, and later in Dublin.  The two main characters are flawed but compelling- Marianne is smart, witty, not particularly pretty and uninterested in what other people think about her.  She also has the fortune/misfortune of being […]

Lyrical, Soulful, Compelling

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugan

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I’ve been wanting to read Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugan’s Giller prize-winning, Booker prize-shortlisted novel, ever since it came out in 2011- its only taken a “Music” bingo square to finally get me there.  Half-Blood Blues is a beautifully written, deeply layered, and historically fascinating novel about a group of mixed-race jazz musicians in Paris and Berlin during the wild interwar years.  The novel opens in Paris in 1941, when one of the band members gets ‘pinched’ by the occupying Nazis. From this navel, the […]



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