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:

Meandering but fascinatingly so

Red Nile by Robert Twigger

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This is a long, dense and very interesting non-fiction collection of snippets of history, geology or curious anecdote (sometimes all three) that Twigger has pulled together, all of them related to the Nile. Of all the Egypt-related books that I’ve read this year (and there were many), this one and the Cleopatra biography are the ones I’ve recommended the most. Twigger, who lived in Cairo at the time of writing (not sure if he left during the Arab Spring), set out to write a biography […]

Cat person

Decoding Your Cat by Meghan E. Herron

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My cats were hanging around the whole time I was reading this book and I kept telling them, “I’m learning all your secrets.” They were nonplussed, which seems about right. Written by veterinarians, the book is set to explain some of the basics of cat behaviour and how we can train our favorite felines to behave differently and/or how we humans can behave differently to adapt around the cat (learning one: cats are trainable! Unlike dogs, people tend to assume cats aren’t trainable so we […]

Not just surviving, but thriving

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

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The Color Purple felt intimidating before I started it- it won Alice Walker the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and it was adapted into a much loved and lauded film that launched Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg’s careers to the next level. (I have seen stills of the film but have yet to watch it). Additionally, I’ve been lumping it in mentally with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which was beautiful writing but tough subject matter (the ‘colour in the title’ wasn’t helping me either). From […]

Light fun mystery fluff

A Herring on the Nile by L.C. Tyler

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Our mystery-writer protagonist, Ethelred Tressider, has booked himself a Nile cruise as a ‘research trip’ for his next novel. As he and his on again/off again girlfriend, Lady Anabelle, are in an off period, Ethelred’s cantankerous editor, Elsie Thirkettle, generously offers to take the second cabin he has booked (Anabelle was very particular about needing her own space). Despite not being the sharpest knife in the block, Ethelred soon realizes that something strange is afoot on their Nile cruise, not least that a) Anabelle has […]

Surprisingly, I liked it!

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

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This book had been sitting on my TBR pile for years and I finally got to it this year. Not only do I get the satisfaction of finally finishing it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that that I quite enjoyed it. Our first person narrator Susie Salmon is a 14 year old girl living with her family in small town Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. When the story starts, Susie is telling her story from beyond the grave (her ‘heaven’), sharing the story […]

Bodies, bodies, bodies, but make it ancient Egypt

Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie

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The place is Thebes, the year is 2000 B.C. and the bodies are piling up! Death Comes as the End is an Agatha Christie mystery set in ancient Egypt; it is the only historical mystery Christie wrote, and the only one to feature entirely non-European characters. The novel kicks off with the family patriarch, Imhotep, returning home to Thebes (modern day Luxor) with a new concubine, Nofret. Nofret, who is decades younger than her new partner, is beautiful but cruel. She quickly antagonizes the rest […]



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