Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Insidious, these false versions of superiority and ease we project onto other families: how often they blind us to the surer comforts of our own.”

The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger

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Holy hell. Did this book make me forget about quarantine and the hell that is our lives in this country right now. I guess there’s nothing better for misery than reading about people that have it worse than you, and that they have no one to blame but themselves. This book was insane. I hated pretty much every single character (INCLUDING CHILDREN), and yet couldn’t put it down. From the opening quote, I knew I was in for a ridiculous story: There is so tantalizing […]

“Hard truths can drive people apart. But great art can bring them back together.”

The Editor by Steven Rowley

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I am certainly not having any trouble with reading right now. I’ve read some absolutely amazing (and some that were just meh) books since March, mostly thanks to this group and to the good folks over at One More Page Books. They deliver! But writing has been a challenge. After a full day of editorial work, I just don’t want to sit down with my laptop and write. Even when I’ve read the most amazing book and want the whole world to know about it. […]

I remember the Russians

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

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Cbr12bingo Nostalgia This book, set in late the 1970s Soviet Union and published in 1981, marks the time of my teenaged years, a time when my personal interest in the Russians began to grow (leading to a long stint in graduate school and a PhD in Russian/Soviet history). Gorky Park was made into a movie (which I never saw) and Martin Cruz Smith went on to write a number of Arkady Renko detective/thriller novels. I think I might have read one of them (Red Square) […]

Where there are women, there are witches

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent

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CBR12 BINGO: Repeat This is a repeat of the Book Club category, as my social distancing book club meets again in September. For this meeting of my book club, we decided to go a little heavier and read this historical fiction about the Salem witch trials. Author Kathleen Kent has a vested interest in the topic, as she is a tenth-generation descendant of Martha Carrier, one of the first women accused and tried as a witch in Salem in 1692. The Heretic’s Daughter looks a […]

A satisfying heroine; not Sherlock Holmes

A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

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CBR12 BINGO: Red A Study in Scarlet Women has been on my radar since last year’s “Classics and Retellings” book club, when a number of Cannonballers reviewed it as an adaptation/retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous work. I was excited that CBR12 BINGO gave me an excuse to pick it up from my library. My enthusiasm arc for this novel can be visualized as a bell curve: I went from “hmm, ok but. . .,” to “wow, this is great!” back down to “mildly positive” […]

If you don’t love science yet, Sam Kean will win you over

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Drama, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean

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CBR12 BINGO: Gateway Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, and his books don’t get any better than The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. I’ve previously reviewed The Disappearing Spoon and Caesar’s Last Breath for CBR, but I decided to re-read The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons because it’s a perfect “gateway” book into both Kean’s work and popular science. Plus, I’ve had a hankering lately to read some brain stuff. The title refers to a pair of doctors who tended to King Henri II of France after […]



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