Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Disney said it best: “What makes a Monster and what makes a Man?” (or in this case hero and villain)

Guys Read: Heroes and Villains by Jon Scieszka

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This series rocks!  READ THEM! You need more? (sigh) Okay…… Guys Reads started around 10 years ago with Guys Write for Guys Read: Boys’ Favorite Authors Write About Being Boys. Jon Scieszka, however, is no stranger to getting boys to read. His Time Warp Trio series was his way of writing for the boys in his classroom who did not have anything to read. Flash forward a few years and Scieszka is knows for many picture books and novels, including the Guys Read series. I […]

There was something of the pavilion about one raincoat…

The Bride of the Innisfallen by Eudora Welty

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Eudora Welty was around 30 when the first of her writing was first published. And in those early stories and novels, you can see the develop of the voice and mind at work. She’s never naive, and in fact is especially sharp, especially in stories like “The Wide Net” and “A Petrified Man” both of which show both a wisdom and irony about relationships. In this collection, she’s clearly older. She’s expanded beyond her Mississippi roots in trying to capture other places in the world […]

When in doubt, be polite

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Book of Enchantments by Patricia C. Wrede

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I highly recommend this series to adults and children alike.  It feels clean, somehow.  There is good and wickedness, but everything eventually works out.  I would not hesitate to give the main series to my nieces and nephews.  There is a focus on manners and politeness and practicality.  Everyone can learn lessons from this, and even if they are lessons you’ve learned before, it’s good to be reminded! Dealing with Dragons I read this right before I read Ogre Enchanted, which probably was not good […]

When the doorbell rings, no one barks.

Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis

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I don’t buy this one. I did buy, I think, the collected stories that I read last year. In that one, it was 700 or so pages of these kinds of small stories and like this one, the list was long and most of the stories were a paragraph at most and sometimes a sentence too. For some reason, that one more or less worked for me. I think that was I felt at the time was that it was interesting, and I was willing […]

She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

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This is a book that takes place in a small Maine town. The central locus of this book is Olive Kitteridge, a retired middle school math teacher with a pharmacist for a husband and a podiatrist for a son. She’s not the center of every single story in the collection, but she is the glue and often the catalyst for them separately and/or together. This is labeled as a “novel in stories” and there’s a lot of different of these floating around. Ultimately I think […]

She was a brilliant painter, really an exceptional artist, and she suffered a lot of pain.

99 Stories of God by Joy Williams

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This is a strange collection of little vignettes and even minor epics. Ostensibly this is a series of stories about God, people interacting with or being touched by God, and in some cases little tongue in cheek conversations with God. This may or may not sound appealing on its face, but the tone of this collection is a little tongue in cheek, with an earnest but not cloying faithfulness and reverence. It’s like if your hippie California aunt who sings in the church choir and […]



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