Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Zirza

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I am an English teacher from the Low Countries. Like everyone else I aspire to one day write a Booker Prize Winner, but until then I contend my self with reading stuff and writing about it. I try to keep the bitchiness to a minimum, but sometimes I can't help myself. In my spare time I enjoy complaining about the weather and sleeping. I lack the attention span for good books and the tolerance for bad ones. I am stuck in literary purgatory. Hey, at least it's warm here.

Zirza's Reviews:

Bated Breath

Breathless by Amy McCulloch

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The great irony about climbing the eight thousanders is this: hubris on those mountains will get you killed, but it requires a great deal of hubris to climb those mountains in the first place. Or is that just me? I love mountaineering stories, even though I have zero desire to crawl up one myself. I guess it’s the niche equivalent of watching football rather than playing it. Even if I had had the desire to put myself through something so strenuous, then Jon Krakauer’s Into […]

Holiday Reads: Alpine Edition

The Clinic by Cate Quinn

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

The Dry by Jane Harper

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

A Sincere Warning About the Entity in your House by Jason Arnopp

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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Apparently, all I need in life is a pile of books, a fridge full of cheese and diet coke and a massive tent. The Clinic (Cate Quinn) ** Certified tough chick (™) Meg checks into an exclusive rehab clinic, not to treat her own burgeoning drug problem, but to discover what happened to her sister Haley, a famous actress who died on the grounds. The clinic claims suicide, but Meg doesn’t buy it and sets out to investigate what really happened.  I read this book […]

Monkey Business

Ivanov by Hanna Bervoets

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It’s 1994 and student Felix van der Elsken has just arrived at JFK airport to begin his studies at an unspecified New York university. Felix is young, gay, and desperately looking for connection and a way to shape his identity. A few months after his stay, he meets a young scientist named Helena. New York in 1994 is in the throes of the AIDS-epidemic, and Helena has made it her mission to find a cure in a decidedly unorthodox fashion. Felix is toying with the […]

The Rain in Spain

April in Spain by John Banville

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Dublin-based pathologist Quirke is vacationing, at the insistence of his psychiatrist wife, on the Spanish coast. It’s the 1950s, and this is still Franco’s Spain, but the city of San Sebastian is sedate and quiet and comfortably warm. Quirke isn’t sure he’s made for vacationing and when he spots a familiar face in the crowd, he can’t help but investigate – because that face belongs to a woman named April Latimer, and April Latimer has been dead for years.  Banville is what one might call […]

Too Many Jonathans, or Too Much Jonathan

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

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Purity ‘Pip’ Tyler is a girl like so many others. It’s 2015, the market has only just begun to convalesce, and she is stuck in a dead-end job with crippling student debt. She is terrible at interpersonal relationships, has managed to alienate most of her friends: she feels like – and for all accounts is – a failure. Her needy mother has never told her who her father is. But then Pip meets Andreas Wolf, Man Who Is Totally Not Julian Assange, and he offers […]

The Luck of the Irish

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

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Retired detective Tom Kettle sits in his wicker chair in front of the window of his seaside apartment in a small, nameless Irish village. He watches the cormorants, he looks at the boxes of books he still hasn’t put up, and he thinks about cleaning his oven and about his deceased wife June, his long-lost children. One day, two detectives show up at his door to ask about a cold case: a priest, stabbed and thrown off a cliff a decade or so earlier. New […]



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