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:

“To be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie”

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

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I read and loved Flaubert’s Parrot in college, so I was really looking forward to reading another book by Barnes, especially a book that won the Booker Prize in 2011.  The Sense of Ending is a slim novella that winds a lot of ideas into its relatively few pages.  The plot outline is fairly simple: our first person narrator, a retired Brit divorcee named Tony Webster, receives a lawyer’s letter informing him that he has been left a diary in a will.  The diary belonged […]

Jumping on this 2012 bandwagon

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

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What a fun read!  Like the movie Booksmart, no sooner was I finished reading this than I began to push it onto other people- you’ll love this!  Its hilarious! A comedy of errors with heart!  It is all of those things, and this is me pushing it onto CBR readers (those of you who haven’t read it already- I realize I’m late to the party). Semple’s novel is a modern family story set in Seattle, centred around genius architect Bernadette Fox- Branch, her tech wizard […]

Bogart made it better

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

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The Maltese Falcon is a mystery novel classic- a 1929 knot on the detective fiction string that extends from Wilkie Collins through to Jo Nesbo and Ian Rankin.  It features all the things we’ve come to expect from the ‘hard-boiled’ sub-genre: a hard-drinking loner detective, a handful of quirky criminal thugs, some pushy cops, a beautiful but possibly duplicitous femme fatale.  Sam Spade is that detective, and he is trying to solve a mystery that builds around him with minimal clues but increasingly plentiful bodies. […]

All the colors in San Francisco’s history

Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya

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I have visited San Francisco more times than any other American city and I have lots of fond memories of it.  Save for Anaheim/ Disneyland, San Fran was the only American city my family visited when I was kid, and I still remember being simultaneously shocked and delighted by all the tattoos, piercings and homosexual PDA that I witnessed on that teenage trip (I grew up on farm on the Canadian prairies in the 90s, so these things were all novel…).  I’ve been back to […]

A witchin’ re-imagining

Circe by Madeline Miller

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Oh, how I loved this.  I saw everyone’s glowing comments on it on last year’s Cannonball Read, but my TBR pile was so big I couldn’t justify buying a new book.  Luckily I made an exception and once I picked it up last week I couldn’t put it down.  I have a backlog of reviews I need to write for other books I finished before I finished Circe, but I wanted to review this one first, before my feelings faded. Miller’s novel is a modern […]

A single story told as though it’s the only one

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls WIlder

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For those of you who missed reading this American children’s classic in your own youth, as I did, Little House on the Prairie is the second (or third, depending on whether you count Farmer Boy, apparently) in Ingalls’ multi-volume Little House set, after Little House in the Big Woods.  It was my first foray in Ingalls’ works, and I don’t think I missed anything by starting out of order.  The book kicks off with Pa Ingalls yearning for a place with less people (the Big […]



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