Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I Needed to Understand the Culture More….Maybe….

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

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I watched the movie, Memoirs of Geisha,  many years ago and remember being a little disenchanted by it. I have vivid memories of the beautiful kimono and well-done settings, but the plot itself has largely escaped me. I always meant to read the book that inspired the film to see if I’d like it better, and since we have a far-and-away square, how much farther away can I get from my home than Japan? I was excited to delve into this story until I saw that it […]

A different idea on [redacted for spoiler]

Recursion by Blake Crouch

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I didn’t have terribly high hopes going into this one. The summary immediately namedrops his previous book, Dark Matter, which I read and came away from utterly bored but the things we do for CBR Bingo, yeah? So consider me pleasantly surprised here! It even feels like a genuinely new take on [redacted for spoiler]. Sorry, I’m censoring myself. I went back to that same summary and realized they don’t actually give away the matter at the heart of this book so you know, I won’t […]

My unpopular take on a classic

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

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cbr11bingo Classic When I was about 10, I tried to read Little Women but found it so boring and such a slog that I gave up. Fast-forward several decades and I hate to say it, but I still kind of feel the same way. The “coming of age” story about the March sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy has important things to say about family, poverty and faith, as well as about the way young ladies ought to behave and what they should strive for. […]

“This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love story, the story of a marriage.”

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

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CBR11bingo: Rainbow Flag Bingo! Diagonally: Remix, The Collection, Own Voices, Rainbow Flag, Summer Read I decided to read something by Andrew Sean Greer for the Rainbow Flag square on the strength of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less, which I read and loved last year. The Story of a Marriage is a very different novel, at least in tone. Where Less is sly and sharp and very funny, The Story of a Marriage is just a bit too earnest for its own good. The Story of […]

“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Bingo square: History/Schmistory (as in alternate history, given that – as with The Handmaid’s Tale – the book ends with historical notes from a symposium about Gilead in the year 2197). Set more than 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is told by three different narrators. There is the familiar Aunt Lydia who we saw through Offred’s eyes in the previous book; a young girl named Daisy living in Canada and unaware of her ties to Gilead; and Agnes, one […]

An Historical Romance- and feminism!

Bringing Down The Duke by Evie Dunmore

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CBR11Bingo History, Schmistory Annabelle Archer has been down on her luck for a while now. A scandalous affair with a nobleman in her youth left her disgraced, and as she is an unmarried woman with no living parents she is dependent on her cousin to keep her. She has been working for his family for years when she finally catches a break- she has been admitted to the first class of women allowed at Oxford University. The catch is that as she has earned a […]



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