Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Debt of Honour

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré

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With the United States in steep (and willing) decline globally, surrendering its power on the world stage, I’ve looked to the works of John Le Carré for inspiration. Le Carré’s greatest gift as an espionage writer was chronicling the decline of Great Britain as a world power and doing so with a combination of wistful attitudes and thrilling writing. Yes there’s a lot of talking, a lot of musing in the books and it can take a while to set the stage. But when it […]

Secret Agent Man

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré

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John Le Carré’s books are often labors of love to read. This was both love and labor with neither of them necessarily intertwining. I don’t want to go into details but there was a specific moment at my job this past week where I had to face down reminders of a rough work moment from years before. Nothing bad in terms of abuse or harassment but awful stuff. And it felt good to be reading “Magnus Pym’s” (Le Carré’s, David Cornwell’s) story at the same […]

C I Yikes

Libra by Don DeLillo

Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer

The Ghost by Robert Harris

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Recently, I read three different books featuring CIA chicanery (two were fictional). This was unintentional but I figured since the themes were similar, I’d just batch review them rather than do individual ones. Libra***** This was a re-read. I liked it the first time. I loved it now that I: a. had a better since of the Oswald timeline after reading Posner’s Case Closed and b. could appreciate the meta-narrative structure in a way I couldn’t before. This is the only DeLillo book I can really […]

Is It Coming Home?

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: fanfic. This is Lev Grossman’s take on the King Arthur mythos.  I don’t really know how to write this review because I loved it and I really want to give it my full throated endorsement. But there are things I loved about the book itself and things as an Arthur fan that I both loved and hated. Let’s start here: it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2024. I liked the first Magicians book, less so the other two. […]

“My mother had little sense of childhood, and simply saw it as an inconvenient life stage to be got through as quickly as possible.”

Diamonds at the Lost and Found by Sarah Aspinall

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I bought a lot of memoirs on my vacation this summer and realized when I got home how many are about fraught mother-daughter relationships. I guess I’m working through something, or else I just like reading about dramatic psychological family structures. Either way, Diamonds at the Lost and Found fits in the template of the troubled mother and the put-upon daughter who’s dragged in her wake. This book takes a nested narrative format, where Aspinall simultaneously tells the story of her childhood and adolescence being […]

hide all you want, but nothing stays buried

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

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Jeanie and Julius have spent their entire lives together. Over half a century of life together has passed, and they have never spent an entire night separate from each other. Jeanie tends the garden with their mother, Dot, and Julius works odd jobs in the village. Jeanie, Julius, and Dot depend fiercely on one another. They accept nothing from the outside world- at least, Jeanie and Julius spent the last 51 years believing that they were accepting nothing and indebted to no one but each […]



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