Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I’m not clockwork.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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CBR13 BINGO: Machinery Big thanks to Merryn for using this novel for the Machinery square. Very clever way to fill a square that would have otherwise had me stumped or using up my free/pandemic options. Machinery with magical shenanigans is more my speed. Thanks! This novel dips its toes into multiple genre pools: historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy and a dash of romance. It’s hard to find a story uninteresting if it can bring together the Fenian bombings of 1884, the premiere of Gilbert and […]

Facts, fiction, and women’s work

The Daring Ladies of Lowell: A Novel by Kate Alcott

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Cbr13bingo Machinery The Daring Ladies of Lowell is  a work of historical fiction set in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832-33. In addition to including much historical fact about women’s working conditions and life at the mill, it also involves a love story and a murder mystery taken from real life.  Kate Alcott (pen name for Patricia O’Brien) takes her readers into the world of her fictional heroine Alice Barrow as she begins work at the mill, gets to know her fellow workers in […]

Equal Parts Delight and Cringe

Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman

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BINGO: Landscape Best for: People who like humorous essays and who don’t mind a lot of cursing and blue humor. Not for people looking for a lot of Parks and Recreation content. In a nutshell: Actor Nick Offerman shares his thoughts on this book that is part memoir, part philosophical treatise. Worth quoting: I spent a lot of time noting things said in the book that frustrated me, but I didn’t actually type out any quotes that stuck with me. Why I chose it: I […]

playing catch-up while playing bingo!

Kink: Stories by R. O. Kwon, Garth Greenwell

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices by Swapna Krishna, Jenn Northington

Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

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Hey y’all- long time, no read! I took some time off from reviewing while on vacation, then let vacation mind take over all of my non-work mind and found myself in a reviewing hole. Then, work swallowed me whole. I started writing this on August 9th. Just finishing it now on the 29th-Cait Also, I haven’t been reading reviews here either, so be prepared for a wave of comments coming your way! Good news: I truly enjoyed all seven of these books. One was a […]

The World Does Not Belong to Us Alone

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

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In this collection of 41 essays Helen Macdonald writes about a wide variety of subjects concerning nature and the way humans relate to it, ranging from a solar eclipse and migrating birds to migraines and mushrooms. This landed on my TBR list when I read this review by KimMiE” which made me curious about the book. I am glad that I followed her advice and read it slowly over several weeks, one essay at a time, because I don’t think I would have enjoyed it […]

Entangled but also Incomplete

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

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Bingo 17: The Wilds I’ll be honest: I was planning to use Entangled Life for the ‘flora’ square except that the author pointed out that fungi and some related things are not actually plants exactly; they are essentially their own thing. That’s actually a major part of the book, just how diverse fungi, lichens, and yeasts are. Anyways, a significant amount of the book is about fungi in their natural habitats (ie- outdoors) and just how little is known, and just how much could be […]



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