Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

To see her is to love her

Sapphire Flames by Ilona Andrews

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4.5 stars This is the first book in a new trilogy, so it will work fine to anyone new to the authors or this fantasy world, but readers may want to have read at least Diamond Fire, a novella which introduces the heroine and bridges the completed trilogy and this new one. In a world where magical abilities bring wealth, power and possibly even fame, Catalina Baylor has reluctantly become the head of House Baylor and the main investigator of her family’s detective agency, after her […]

…using our legs to proceed across the landscape.

A Walk In The Woods by Bill Bryson

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CBR11 BINGO: Travel (BINGO! Pajiba square to Science square) This is one of those books that I heard about forever ago and passed by constantly on bookshelves. Novels with nature as a character are kind of my thing but non-fiction generally is not. Once again, Cannonball Read BINGO has pushed me to read something I most likely would have never gotten around to. (I’m just 3 squares from a black out, people. THREE and I will see it to fruition!) A quick Google search of “best travel books” landed […]

“He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t. The sixteenth second was a killer.”

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

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CBR11 Bingo: #pajiba I hadn’t heard of this lovely book until Dustin wrote about it over the summer. And then I saw it EVERYWHERE. On every list. In every store. Every day on every social media platform. Apparently, I had to read it. I’m quite glad I did. Evvie Drake has been widowed for about a year. She has barely coped since her husband died — she doesn’t leave the house much, she doesn’t really socialize with anyone (ecxept for her best friend, Andy), and […]

Shining Light on Colonialism

Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah

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Dr. David Livingstone died in May of 1873 in a village called Chitambo (in present day Zambia), located in central Africa. His African attendants buried his heart there, embalmed his body, and then transported it along with his papers over 1500 miles to Zanzibar so that they could be returned to England. The journey took 200+ days and two of the men on the trip Susi and Chuma gave a short account of it, mentioning illness and deaths within the travel party and other dangers […]

Child me would have LOVED this book, adult me thinks it’s pretty great: CBR Bingo – Birthday

Matilda by Roald Dahl

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When looking for which authors have a birthday to fit the bingo requirements, I discovered that Roald Dahl’s birthday is September 13th.  I’ve previously read a few other books by Dahl but had never read Matilda, so this seemed like a good time. When first published in 1988, I would have been eight years old and it would have been perfect for me to discover in about another two years.  However, it escaped notice and when the movie came out in 1996, I was entering my […]

…how disease sometimes exposes what is otherwise hidden.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

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This was another book that was displayed by the wise librarians to reel me in. As usual, it worked. Apparently, Karen Thompson Walker is known for her debut novel, Age of Miracles, which appeared on loads of “Best of” lists the year it was published. I will be hunting that book down immediately. The apocalyptic-pandemic trope is a popular one, but Walker does something completely different with it here. A freshman at a small college in California falls asleep and doesn’t wake up. What soon becomes […]



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