Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Triple Cannonballing with fugitive Blanche, here to solve your murder mysteries and nose around until all your secrets are exposed.

Blanche on the Lam (Blanche White, #1) by Barbara Neely

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This was published in 1992 so it should have SO MANY more ratings on Goodreads than it does. It was very good! Mystery/crime junkies, consider this your notice. A fun series is waiting for you. There are only four books in it, and this is the first. And if you have KU or Audible, it’s free! I highly enjoyed the audiobook experience, if you are an audiobook person. The book opens with Blanche—who I now love with all my heart—sitting in court waiting to hear […]

Hi, it’s me, the worst book of the year.

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

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I’m not mad just disappointed. Just kidding, I’m pretty mad. I’m going to say what many reviewers have said before me: This is not a book about a man who is swallowed by a whale and has to use science to get out alive. This is a book about a man (a teenager, actually, but more on that below) who has daddy issues real bad, and he happens to be swallowed by a whale also. The parts with the whale are few and far between—it […]

Soylent Green is people!

Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken

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I like the idea of eating and living in a healthy way, so I’ve read a number of nutrition/food books. However, this topic is so complicated, and there are so many opinions that it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. It seems that everyone has an agenda and can cherry pick data to support their cause. Perhaps that’s why I thought Michael Pollen’s advice from In Defense of Food was the most helpful: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” You could say that Chris Van Tulleken […]

Look, I just want to give this author five stars but he makes it so difficult!

The Tyranny of Faith (Empire of the Wolf, #2) by Richard Swan

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Look, I may feel differently upon re-read, but this author cannot write romance to save his life. Both of these books so far have been made worse by his efforts in that department. His instincts are all wrong. In the first book, it was an underdeveloped and ill-advised “romance” between our narrator, Helena, the apprentice of famed Justice Sir Konrad Vonvalt, and some village rube who had zero personality. Here, it’s between Helena and Vonvalt himself and just UGH. NO. WHY. Luckily the romance never […]

“Home is a choice and sometimes a hard one. What you choose to accept. What you embrace.”

Lute by Jennifer Marie Thorne

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Nina Treadway is the lady of Lute, but she’s only lived there for seven years, since she got married to Hugh. As a foreigner, she doesn’t believe in the island’s day of the tithe, but as things start going wrong all around her, she wonders if it might be more than a superstition. Folk horror! A mysterious day of human sacrifice as an island extracts the price of its bounty from its residents! An American abroad! And that cover is so very beautiful, and so […]

Complex – Needs a Second Read

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

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Best for: People interested in a novel way of looking at the complexities of modern politics. In a nutshell: Author Klein explores the different political realities people inhabit in areas as vast as vaccines and Middle East policies. Worth quoting: We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, […]



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