Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A pair of DNFs

I Like it Like That / The World According to Monsanto by Claire Calman / Marie-Monique Robin

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I’m pairing these two lackluster books here because although very different (a paperback romance and a non-fiction expose), they were alike in 1) that they’ve been in my TBR for years; 2) I finally started to read them; and 3) I did not finish either.  I’m usually a fairly strict book finisher, even if it’s a hate-read (Faulkner, I’m looking at you).  With these two, I realized that my hate-finish policy was not assisting me- my TBR pile is too big to read books I’m […]

Fun, witty mystery set in a grim era

The Scandal at Bletchley: A Hilary Manningham-Butler Mystery (#1) by Jack Treby

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Cbr11bingo Summer Read The Scandal at Bletchley * is the first in what promises to be a fun mystery series featuring an unorthodox detective. Sir Hilary Manningham-Butler is a former employee of Britain’s spy agency, MI5, now married conveniently if not happily to the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. In October of 1929, as the world’s stock markets are on the verge of collapse, so is Hilary’s life. It is discovered at a weekend reunion of some MI5 veterans at Bletchley Park that a murderer is […]

Friends Like These

Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

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cbr11bingo – Listicle: Slate’s Best Books of 2017 After reading and thoroughly enjoying Sally Rooney’s Normal People, I knew it was only a matter of time before I went back and read her first novel. Conversations With Friends is about the interpersonal dynamics between four people: Frances, a young writer at university who identifies as bisexual, her best-friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi, and Melissa and Nick, a married couple ten years older than them that they meet in Dublin’s literary scene. Melissa is a photojournalist and […]

Somebody Set Me Up

The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake

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cbr11bingo – Reader’s Choice, replacing “Two Heads Are Better than One.” Donald Westlake has one of those “writer’s writer” reputations, so I’ve always meant to check out his work. This is one of his earliest novels, originally published under the title “The Mercenaries” and re-issued by Hard Case Crime. The main character and narrator is George “Clay” Clayton, right-hand man for crime boss Ed Ganolese. As Clay and his live-in girlfriend are settling in to bed one night, they are disturbed by a knock on […]

You can die from constipation. Just ask Elvis Presley’s doctor.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

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CBR11bingo: Science If you do a Google search for “how did Elvis Presley die,” most answers will mention prescription drugs and cardiac arrest. Until I read Gulp, I hadn’t heard that the King had what’s known as a megacolon, which is exactly what it sounds like: a big-ass large intestine. According to his personal physician George Nichopoulos, the condition gave Elvis such terrible constipation that Nichopoulous had to administer laxatives and enemas on an almost daily basis. Whether the condition was the result of genetics […]

A long apprenticeship for this final act of bad judgment

Orfeo by Richard Powers

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CBR BINGO: Awards (2014 California Book Awards Silver Medal Fiction/ Man Booker long list) Somehow I managed not to get the memo regarding Richard Powers earlier in his career. I picked up “Overstory” last year because it was displayed at the library, had trees on the cover and looked like it checked all of my eco-fiction boxes. (I’m still wondering what to call the nature/environmental/ecology centric fiction that I love. Is there an established understood category for this? Anyone?) Didn’t realize I was picking up the […]



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