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:

Trudging through Drudgery

The Ritual by Mo Hayder

Magnus by Arjen Lubach

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The Ritual (Mo Hayder) ***½ When it comes to thrillers and crime fiction, I’m stuck in a quandary in the sense that I usually like the idea better than the execution. My main problem is that so many books within the genre seem so badly written: the characters are flat, the prose is hokey and the authors always seem to want to outdo each other by coming up with either the goriest or the most outlandish plots. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but […]

The Dinner

The Dinner by Herman Koch

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An unremarkable couple stand in an unremarkable pub drinking unremarkable beer. Their names are Paul and Claire. They’re bracing themselves, for they are about to go to dinner with Paul’s brother Serge and his wife Babette. Serge is a rising star in national politics, primed for the position of PM after the elections, which are only six months away. Paul has picked the restaurant (mere mortals will need to book months in advance but they keep a table back for ‘people like me’), for they […]

Slightly Baffled

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

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Warning: here be spoilers America, sometime in the near future. Astrobiologist Theo Byrne raises his son Robin alone after the death of his wife. He feels like he’s doing a terrible job, especially when Robin is sent home from school for smashing his only friend’s face with a thermos. Robin is a complicated child; intelligent but suffering from Aspergers, ADHD, OCD and probably a few other things. Theo is weary to accept the decision; Robin’s school, meanwhile, is pushing him to put the boy on […]

Disintegration Station

The Promise by Damon Galgut

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South Africa, 1987. As the country is in the death throes of Apartheid, defiantly buckling under the weight of an international boycott, a Jewish woman named Rachel Swart, mother of three and wife to farmer Herman ‘Manie’ Swart, dies of an unnamed disease. She makes her husband promise to gift the little shack on the back of her property to Salome, their maid. Amor, their youngest daughter, overhears them. After Rachel’s death the promise seems all too soon forgotten; they seem surprised whenever Amor brings […]

It’s Writing By Numbers but at Least the Painting is Good

The Outsider by Alex Finlay

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Grayson ‘Gray’ Hernandez has just finished law school. He dreams of making a big splash as a hot-shot lawyer, but so far his career hasn’t really taken off yet. Forever the idealist – his immigrant parents run a pizza place in a bad neighbourhood, and Gray wants to help them – he takes up a job as a Supreme Court messenger. It doesn’t pay much but at least he gets to be around the most brilliant minds of the country. Then, one night, the Chief […]

Writing by Numbers

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

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Thirty-six year old Mariana works as a group therapist in London as she mourns the loss of her beloved husband Sebastian, who drowned off the coast of the Greek island of Naxos a year earlier. When her niece Zoë calls her and tells her that her best friend has been found dead, Mariana seizes the chance and travels to Cambridge to offer comfort. But she soon finds herself in the middle of the investigation, and as other girls turn up dead she looks toward a […]



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