Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

How to Love Your Neighbour

How to Love Your Neighbour by Sophie Sullivan

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I have been trying to finish this book for 5 months. It just did not hold my interest. Maybe because renovations are not that interesting to read about. And honestly, the design work that Gracie did sounded basic as anything. I started having flashbacks to that Nora Roberts Inn trilogy where we heard all about beds, painting, floors, etc. and my eyes glazed. Those three books became a hate read after a while. The romance between Gracie and Noah is good, it’s a nice slow […]

“Evil never goes unpunished…but the punishment is sometimes secret.”

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie

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CBR Bingo Square: Camel/Adaptation “Poirot,” I said. “I have been thinking.” “An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.” Alright, it’s not all just highfalutin’ theme reading over here (but the summer of Irish fiction rolls on), I am also cramming in books that are simply and purely for fun. Most of my Golden Age crime fiction reading for the past year or two has been working through Ngaio Marsh’s back catalog, but I’ve also been dabbling in some Christie here and there. And I really […]

Not What I Was Expecting? Maybe?

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories by Karen Russell

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I absolutely loved Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove short story collection, but was really disappointed in Swamplandia!, so when I saw she had another short story collection, I was so excited to read more of her short works. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves was….not what I was expecting? Granted, Vampires was published in 2013, and St. Lucy’s is her first collection, published in 2006, so I may just be running into my usual issue of having read an author in reverse. But where a […]

“How you say what you mean changes what you say.”

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

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CBR Bingo – Verse, for this lovely book of poetry I am an avid reader – and I love a good poem, especially one embedded into a narrative. When a character reads a poem in a novel, I always think, I should read more poetry. But I rarely have the patience to finish an entire book of poetry. This book, consumed over several days, in between chapters of the book that I am STILL reading (Hanya Yanagihara writes looong books!) – this book might be […]

The One Where I Just Want to Quote the Whole Book

Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches from the American Dystopia by Luke O’Neil

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CBR Bingo: Series I also didn’t want to write a story from the neutered and dispassionate center that most mainstream publications require. I didn’t want to hear from a person suffering and then give space to the person causing that suffering to explain themselves. Something I wrote in one of the first newsletters I sent out was that my only promise to the readers is that I will never hear both sides and I think I kept that one. Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World: […]

life on the edge, in more ways than one

The Colony by Audrey Magee

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CBR Bingo Square: New Another entry in my summer of Irish fiction, but also one of the two Irish novels that made it onto this year’s Booker Prize longlist! (It’s a fun longlist this year, too, with both the oldest and youngest nominees, and the shortest book ever nominated.) I’m still waiting on Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These from the library, but I was able to check out Aubrey Magee’s The Colony almost immediately. And, oof, what a good novel. The novel is set on a […]



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