Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Notorious Pleasures is the title, not the reading experience

Notorious Pleasures by Elizabeth Hoyt

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I read the first book in this, the Maiden Lane series, but didn’t do a write up for it before starting book two and now it has sort of evaporated out of my head so I am just going to skip that one and go straight into Notorious Pleasures. Notorious Pleasures deals with Lady Hero Batten, the lovely, proper, and dutiful sister of the Duke of Wakefield, who is about to be engaged to Thomas Reading, the Marquess of Mandeville. The book opens with her […]

“My expectations for a husband had lowered.”

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

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Trying to summarize this is hard, because there are a lot of different storylines and viewpoints.  We have Miryem, the daughter of a not-very-good moneylender. Oh, he’s a good man, too good to be a moneylender in fact, in that he’s not the best at collecting his money back.  Miryem eventually decides to take up the slack and collect the debts herself. Responsibility takes a toll on people, especially when you have to take that burden from someone else.  She idly makes a comment that […]

…a place of knowledge, that is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and fundamentally kind.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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I need some more non fiction in my life.  I generally like to read things that take me away from myself and my world when possible. It’s not that I don’t ever read challenging material or books that might make me uncomfortable. I do that as well, but I tend to pick things that transport me from my “real world” to fictional alternative worlds or historical worlds. I often associate non fiction with biographies, self help and dry textbooks  even though I know that is […]

Read it, like a child, into the night

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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Helen Franklin is an English ex-pat in Prague on a mission to penalize herself for a mysterious past. However she cannot avoid the friendship of Karel and Thea and for a while she is almost happy. Then Melmoth appears. Melmoth is the an old tale of the wanderer, the one who is there to witness when no one else is and what she sees is the depravity, the loss the despair. Melmoth is just a myth, or so it seems until Karel gets a letter […]

…if It Wasn’t For You Meddling Kids…

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

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  The show Scooby Doo holds a very special place in my heart in all of its iterations because I love it just that much. Fun fact, I saw that there was going to be a Scooby Doo/Supernatural crossover show and having watched no Supernatural at all, I watched 13 straight seasons so I could know what was going on.  The joke was on me, because I didn’t know that there were stand alone episodes and that Scoobynatural was one of them.  It’s fine, I fell […]

I go down into black water. It is dark and silent, but not — never, any more — deserted.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

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After a bit of a slow start to the year, my reading took off. I finished seven books in three weeks and started to entertain the possibility of an elusive Double Cannonball. Then two things happened: I found a renewed sense of dedication and spent more of my time actually writing — FINALLY — and I also decided it was time to tackle Nick Harkaway’s monster of a book, Gnomon. Farewell, Double Cannonball. Maybe someday . . . In the not-too-distant future the UK has […]



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