Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bookclub re-read: were we ever this young???

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

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I have had this book for years now, evidentially procured from some sort of bookstore or library because there’s a sticker on the spine. I’ve read it and re-read it many times while home. This time, I re-read it in preparation for book club, theme of which is “a book from your childhood/young adulthood which talked about adulthood which, now that you are an adult, reads very differently.” Which is a long winded way of saying, things aren’t always what they seem when you were […]

Bingo! (CBR12Bingo 2: Book club)

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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I was wondering how I was going to make a book club pick twice, as I’m not much of a joiner and my coworker book club basically meets every six months once we ask for extensions … and more extensions … and plan to get together and cancel those plans…. so no way we were going to have the next pick ready in time. And I am going to do my level best not to use the reader’s choice square, because this is a challenge […]

“Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives”

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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I don’t know, really, what I was expecting from this book and I’m also not sure that whatever those expectations were that they were met. I was able to watch an author discussion between Mandel and Isaac Fitzgerald hosted by the Greenlight bookstore in the spring when this book was released and I left that experience knowing that the book featured a Ponzi scheme and focused around the 2008 economic collapse, and that a main character died and also that estrangement of many types was […]

Book Club Discussion: The Glass Hotel

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Our third and final book club of the year has arrived, and I’m excited to see what everyone has to think about Emily St. John Mandel’s latest The Glass Hotel. For those of you who might be joining in for #CannonBookClub for the first time (hello new friends!) all are welcome, and you don’t need to be registered* for this year’s Read to speak your mind. For the boilerplate: ground rules remain the same as they always have. The topics are numbered, and we ask […]

Reminder: The Glass Hotel #CannonBookClub is Coming Soon

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Our third and final book club of the year will be October 16 and 17 and we’re circling back around to Emily St. John Mandel and her newest book, The Glass Hotel which was released earlier this year. The Glass Hotel is described as: …a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it. So, if […]

“There is much goodness in him, and he is as noble as a man without real love can be.”

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke

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One evening in Germany in the late 1980s, a mother and her two children sit around the dinner table, expecting the father home from a business trip any minute. As time passes, the teenage daughter ponders her family and her childhood, and slowly reveals the ugly truth behind the facade of a normal family life. This is a short book that functions on two levels. On the surface, it is the portrait of a family that looks rather ordinary at first glance, but the more […]



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