Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Breakfast with the Borgias.”

A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple, #7) by Agatha Christie

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This one was really good! I think it might be my favorite of the Miss Marple books I’ve read so far, which is about half of them. (Until now I liked A Murder is Announced the best, because it had so much of Miss Marple in it, but this one barely features her at all, and it was quite good, so who knows what my standards even are anymore.) This is one of her infamous nursery rhyme mysteries (I think she did three or four […]

HALF CANNONBALL!

Patterns of Fashions 2: Englishwomen's Dresses & Their Construction, 1860 - 1940 by Janet Arnold

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My boss travels a lot, which means I get amazing gifts from far away places upon his return. This year he did a study-abroad to our sister-campus over in England, and I got this amazing illustrated tutorial, Patterns of Fashion 2: 1860 – 1940, from his trip to the Fashion Museum of Bath. I got quite a laugh out of his tale of buying the book. He knew that I love to make historical clothing (there are several photos on my desk of me in […]

Bucolic listening

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Because I’ve been consumed with one of those jobs that requires 12 hours- a-day attention, I haven’t been reading much, but I do get to have some time with my precious audio books, and so I turned my attention to something more literary for my last listen, knowing I wouldn’t be getting do that with a physical book. Some spoilers follow! The narrator of Never Let Me Go has a comforting, almost bucolic way of telling the story. Can a person speak in a bucolic […]

“Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success.” – Not Hastings

The Murder on the Links (Hercule Poirot, #2) by Agatha Christie

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Okay, first of all, Hastings is an *idiot*. I don’t think I quite realized that in the other books I’ve read with him in them. He’s supposedly modeled after Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories, an audience surrogate character, but Watson gets an unfair rap about his bumbling—a side effect of his characterization on film rather than evidence in the canon—whereas Hastings is genuinely a boob, and one that doesn’t realize the extent of his boobitude. In this one, not only does he get everything […]

I read this book three months ago. It was great!

The Austen Playbook (London Celebrities, #4) by Lucy Parker

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This was almost a five star read for me. I’ve been trying to catch up on my enormous backlog of reviews, and when I picked this up to give myself a refresher (it’s been almost three months since I finished it), I ended up sort of revisiting it for a couple of hours. You know, not a full re-read, but just sort of lovingly scrolling through it and re-reading favorite bits. But for some reason I still can’t quite bring myself to give it the […]

“The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, ‘What about me?’ and you can just hear the universe replying, ‘Well, what about you?'”

Thief of Time (Discworld, #26) by Terry Pratchett

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There wasn’t enough Death in this, but then again, he’s done all his growing already in other books, so that was probably the smart choice. I still really enjoyed it. The actual main characters of this book are Death’s granddaughter, Susan, who has reached the ultimate peak of her badassdom; a history monk named Lu-Tze; and his apprentice, Lobsang. The history monks are cool. They live in this place where Time doesn’t really exist, and their job is to basically monitor history, and in a […]



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