Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Murder she solved

The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James

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The Skull Beneath the Skin is the 3rd and final novel in the brick of a P.D. James compilation I’ve been reading.  Luckily things went out on a high note as this last novel was my favourite of the three.  Unlike the previous two novels (The Black Tower and Death of an Expert Witness), The Skull Beneath the Skin is a Cordelia Gray mystery (the others featured her Scotland Yard detective, Adam Dalgliesh). The mystery in Skull Beneath the Skin kicks off after Cordelia, who […]

Varied Love in Space

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

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Bingo Review 5: Cannonballer Says Still going totally out of order from the plan, and there is/was a written out plan, but this time it’s because of the timing of something coming into my local library. Anyways, I decided to request The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet because it had been an option for the June 2020 bookclub (also apparently in 2018) and some of the discussion comments made it sound interesting. It’s gotten somewhat mixed reviews by Cannonballers, but at least one […]

Another Fake Relationship M/M Romance

Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

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CBR 12 Bingo: Pandemic. Between pandemic stress and some personal stressors, I’ve been wanting to read light-hearted books, especially funny contemporary romance. The novel is told in the first person from the perspective of Lucien (Luc) O’Donnell, who is the son of formerly famous rock star parents. Five years ago his boyfriend sold his story about dating Luc to a tabloid, and Luc has been a mess ever since. He works for a charity focused on saving the dung beetle, and after a rather unflattering […]

It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago–I was twenty-three…

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

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CBR12Bingo – Fresh Start This is the first Nathan Zuckerman novel and the only previous ones I’ve read were The Human Stain in which he plays the narrator, but not the protagonist, and Exit Ghost, the final novel that ties up loose ends that I didn’t know existed when I read it. In this novel, we find the older Zuckerman looking back at himself at 23. He’s visiting with a renowned Jewish writer (who wrote and published in Yiddish and was translated into English) who we cannot […]

“Mister Isherwood?”

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

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CBR Bingo 12 – Violet This is an often very funny, ultimately sad novel about filmmaking in the 1930s. The character Christopher Isherwood narrates this novel (and if you have read others of his work you’ll know how he does with this). He’s tempted into a writing job, to work on a screenplay, by an old friend of his family. When he arrives, thinking that he wants to turn down the work because of a sense of vulgarity, he begins to change his tune as […]

I became an engineer.

A Single Pebble by John Hersey

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CBR Bingo 12 – The Roaring 20s. A 1955 novel by John Hersey, who is most well known for his small book Hiroshima, a nonfiction accounting of the atomic bombing and for his Pulitzer prize winning novel, A Bell for Adano, this book follows a young American engineer on a boat moving up the Yangtze en route to a job. So Hersey was born and grew up in China, and part of this book seems to be a kind of reckoning with that childhood, but also maybe a […]



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