Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The insuperable gap between east and west that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than an optical illusion.

The Bridge on the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle

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CBR12Bingo – No Money – Library Book The Bridge on the River Kwai So this book is the book the movie is based on, though the book is relatively small in scope compared to the grandness and sheer size of the movie. It most reminds me of the differences between the intimate spaces of CS Forrester’s The African Queen and the John Huston movie of the same. The book is a slim 200 pages and is almost entirely realistic narration and pretty straight forward characterization as […]

When Mental was alive, he was a boss-man with eighteen or twenty children working for him, and he almost never raised his hand against any of them.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

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CBR12Bingo – Debut (2020) This is a 2020 debut novel from the Indian journalist Deepa Anappara. The novel takes place mostly on the outskirts of Mumbai as a group of school-age children seeks answers about a missing friend, whose name is soon added to a list of additional missing people. The novel primarily takes place in their small community neighborhood, the shops, the homes, and the school, but with various journeys more into the interior of the city looking for answers. The novel is primarily […]

The film is WAY better than the book

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

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#CBR12 Bingo: Adaptation (was turned into a movie in 2015 – the film is way better than the book) (Can also be read for Debut) Official book description: Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics.   Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel.   Rachel has been […]

90s Hard Sci Fi Classic

Quarantine by Greg Egan

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Revisiting a book I loved from early 90s, I wondered if it would hold up.  It sure does.  It gripped me again from the killer opening line: “Only the most paranoid clients phone me in my sleep.” Nick Stavrianos is a PI, hired to search for a woman who disappeared from her room in a secure mental institution.  He is an ex-cop who can use his standard police neurological mods to ‘prime’ himself into what his ex-wife called the ‘zombie boy scout’, “so earnest, so […]

“When you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

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#CBR12 Bingo: White Whale (on my TBR list since early 2014) (Would also work for Cannonballer Says, Debut, or Red or Yellow – depending on what edition of the novel you are reading) Don Tillman lives his life on a fairly rigid schedule. He eats the same things every week, he has set aside a certain amount of time for work, exercise, cleaning his flat and so forth, and any deviations that force him to change the schedule makes him annoyed. He doesn’t socialise much, except for the […]

Never saw the movie, and the book has not inspired me to do so

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

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Bingo Review 6: Adaptation I never did go see the movie Crazy Rich Asians, but when it first came out and was such a big hit, I thought it sounded entertaining, and picked up the book. It’s been on my shelf ever since. I haven’t gotten to it until now because I often don’t like general fiction novels or romance. This book was written very much as a romantic comedy, and much of the plot follows the expected trajectory of boy and girl are getting […]



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