Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Gruesome and Grotesque but also Wow!

The Wolf and the Watchman: 1793: A Novel by Niklas Natt och Dag

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Cannonball! I think I was only able to finish this novel, which really is extraordinary, by cheating on it with The House in the Cerulean Sea. I tend to be “monolibrous” — I word I am coining to mean one who does not start a new novel until having finished the one they’re already reading. The Wolf and the Watchman was so intense, and so gritty and disturbing, that I had to take breaks from it. It is to the credit of Swedish author Niklas Natt […]

An old-fashioned book, and I mean that in the best possible way

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House by Eric Hodgins

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CBR14 BINGO: Heart, because I received this book from my hubby for our anniversary, and also because it was the inspiration for a movie I absolutely love. Long before I ever owned a home, much less thought about remodeling one, I loved the movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, my two favorite actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When my husband and I began pursuing the idea of doing major renovations on our house about five years ago, the movie […]

The first step to letting go is not feeling obligated to finish a crap book

Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty

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CBR14 BINGO: Mind, because this book is about training your mind to “think like a monk.” Also, my mind was greatly relieved when I decided I didn’t need to finish it. I went into this book with complete sincerity. I’d been feeling extremely stressed and caught up in too many pointless non-problems, so when I remembered we had a copy of Think Like a Monk, I thought my problems were over! I even vowed to read carefully, not rushing through in an effort to finish […]

I like you just the way you are

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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This is one of the sweetest stories I’ve ever read. It’s about difference, exclusion, prejudice, unconventional families, the magic of love and inclusion, which all sounds lovely and perhaps a bit cliché. The thing is, author TJ Klune writes about these topics in a way that is sometimes surprising and always effective. Klune has created a world in which magic and “monsters” exist, and those children who show signs of having magic are separated from the rest of society and put in orphanages run by […]

Look for the Bare Necessities! Classic storytelling, talking animals, and a scoop of racism.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

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CBR 14 BINGO: Snake, because snakes figure into multiple stories in this book (Kaa the snake in Mowgli’s stories, and Nag & Nagaina in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”) The Jungle Book has got to be the classic “Love it AND Hate it” book. On the one hand you get classic storytelling by a Nobel-prize winning author and talking animals. On the other hand, you get to feel uncomfortable in a way that only a 19th-Century white man born under the British Raj in India can make you feel. […]

“Large groups of powerful men have little reason to make change.”

Heartbreaker by Sarah Maclean

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CBR14 Bingo: Heart (it’s right there in the title, and this is a romance) Adelaide Frampton was once the unappreciated daughter of one of the East End’s most notorious criminals, which led her to acquire a number of illegal skills that now come in handy as she frequents London’s high society posing as the unassuming and plain spinster cousin of a duchess. She uses her time on the sidelines of ballrooms and society events to observe and acquire information and can also put her top-notch […]



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