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:

Getting Bougie With It

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

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In a nameless Hanseatic city in northern Germany in 1835, the Buddenbrook family has gathered in the salon of their brand new and fairly ostentatious home. There are the grandparents, parents Johann and Elizabeth, sons Thomas and Christian and daughter Antonie (Tony). They are proud, up and coming members of the local upper middle class. They aspire to greatness. And by the end of the novel, it is 1877 and the family has fallen to ruin. In short: Buddenbrooks is about as sunny as you’d […]

It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Tries To Leave Your Corpse in a Secret Cave

Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

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It’s fourteen year old Emma’s first summer away from home: she’s off to what is colloquially known as Camp Rich Bitch, a summer camp for the East Coast’s elite. Because Emma, thanks to her negligent parents, arrives late, she ends up sharing her cabin with three other girls, all of whom are several years older. A week after the start of the camp, the girls suddenly vanish. Emma is left behind, confused and hurt. But Emma isn’t entirely truthful.  The camp closes not long after […]

To The Moon

Love You More by Lisa Gardner

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Here’s something funny: as evidenced by a thousand hammy postcards and Live Laugh Love-adjacent signs, Love you to the moon and back is a term of endearment in English. In Dutch, however, if you want to tell someone to fuck off, you tell them to walk to the moon. I’m not sure what that says about us as a people, but I was reminded of the duality by Gardner’s Love You More. Not because it involves either linguistics of astronomy, but because there’s an inherent […]

Teeny Weeny

Eeny Meeny by M.J. Arlidge

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Crime fiction, at its best, can be nail bitingly tense. It can reveal profound truths about human nature. It can bring shock and horror and comfort at the same time. That all, of course, assumes the novel you’re reading is actually any good. Eeny Meeny, as you might suspect, is not one of these books.  In hindsight, the title probably should’ve clued me in on that.  The plot in a nutshell: a crazed psychopath kidnaps two people at a time and leaves them to die […]

By Golly

Holly by Stephen King

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Unlikely private eye Holly Gibney is hired by the mother of a missing woman to track down her daughter. At first, Holly assumes the daughter has simply run away, tired of her overbearing mother, but she soon discovers that something more sinister is at play. I majored in English. Trust me when I say there’s little that sucks the joy out of reading as much as majoring in English, because you’re bound to overthink everything you read. The fun stuff isn’t good enough and the […]

Teenage Kicks

The Girls by Emma Cline

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It’s 1969, and 14 year old Evie is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Her parents have divorced and she lives with her early middle aged mother who is out on a self-search quest full of enemas, wheatgrass and horoscopes. Evie underperforms at school and is set to go to boarding school after the summer, and she spends her summer hanging around with her one true friend, whom she dislikes, obsessively reading magazines and following their hammy beauty routines. Evie is obsessed with […]



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