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:

If you thought Dan Brown was bad…

The Witch of Babylon by DJ McIntosh

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The back cover blurb for this book positions it as a sort of ‘DaVinci’s Code set in ancient Mesopotamia!’: mysterious and powerful ancient artifacts, a deadly conspiracy to keep these artifacts secreted, and an antiques dealer protagonist who is out to solve the mystery. John Madison is the antiques dealer protagonist, and his adventure into ancient Iraq begins when his older half brother, Samuel, an archeologist, is killed in a mysterious accident. Unbeknownst to John, his brother has sold their joint New York City apartment […]

Men, Follow Your Dreams! Women, errr- just keep on keeping on

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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I feel like The Alchemist was a ship that I missed when it first sailed many years ago- it was such a sensation that tabloids showed all sorts of famous people (Bill Clinton!) reading it and it was optioned for an (as yet unmade) film. So here I am, reading it only 30 years late. The Alchemist is a very slim novel, just over 150 generously spaced pages. It follows Santiago, a shepherd boy from Andalusia who follows his dream of finding treasure under the […]

The Woman, The Myth, The Legend

Cleopatra, A Life by Stacey Schiff

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When in Egypt, amirite? I was going to pit this as a battle of two Cleopatra books with the Shakespeare play but it turns out I had a lot to say so I ended up splitting them. For the best I think, as they’re both so different- Shakespeare’s play is one layer in the myths of this real historical woman that Schiff is trying to dig through. In that context, Shakespeare is maybe one of the best known mythmakers; his play helped carry the myth […]

Drama Queen

Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

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Ah, Shakespeare- takes me right back to high school English class! (Truthfully though: I hadn’t read this play nor seen it performed, but the general strokes of the story were familiar.) Ready? Here goes: Marc Antony, the great Roman general, is uneasily sharing power with Octavius, Julius Ceaser’s nephew, and a third general, Lepidius. Antony has come to Egypt as part of the triumvirate’s previous battles against outside enemies and fallen in love with the seductive Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra. Now that the outside enemies have […]

Just a cog in the Prison Industrial Complex

Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman

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Piper Kerman’s memoir was adapted by Netflix as one of its first original content tv shows, with the show arguably overshadowing the book itself. That’s a real shame, as while the show is a great showcase for some diverse female actresses, it lacks the nuance and social issues highlighted by the book. The book chronicles Kerman’s year in a New England prison in the early aughts, roughly 10 years after she committed a drug trafficking offense that led her there. She tells the memoir largely […]

Romp Through Ancient History

Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs by Barbara Mertz

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Barbara Mertz was an Egyptologist and author; in addition to this non-fiction entry she has a mystery series under the pen name Elizabeth Peters, featuring an intrepid female Egyptologist crime solver. Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics is a quick historical romp through ancient Egypt, beginning at the beginning (the first pharaoh, Narmer, he of the stone palette trumpeting the unification of upper and lower Egypt that is taken as the usual start of ancient Egyptian history), through to Egypt becoming a vassal Roman state (fall of […]



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