Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The English Patient

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

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CBR14Bingo – Rec’d – This book is “recommended” in the sense that when I was in high school, a crush of mine told me I should read it, and it was presented in an obviously challenging way, but I didn’t get it. I also didn’t get that it was flirtatious, and honestly a little revealing about their intentions. The book has the real disservice of people deciding that the movie is long and boring. I actually like the movie a lot, but the weird thing […]

‘… the unleashed feminine, that awesome maelstrom of incredible sexual and physical power – multiple orgasm, gestation, birth, breastfeeding – so often feared, is dangerous and often leads to a terrible afterlife.’

A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America's Ghosts by Leanna Renee Hieber, Andrea Janes

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CBR 14 Bingo: Gaslight Ghosts glide by through the present time now, but their own time is the past, replete with grimy streets and gas(-)lighting. Authors and ghost tour guides Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes tell the stories of America’s female ghosts, discussing how they fall in the landscape of gender and time. I enjoy a good ghost story, which was why I requested this book on NetGalley. However, what I learned was far beyond the scope of merely spooky tales, and I really […]

“My ladies had changed nothing but the reasons for their pretense. If I had learned anything from them, it was this: only a fool lives in water and remains an enemy of the crocodile.”

The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Shadow Y’all. I finished this book May 17th for my library book club, and I am just now (finally) reviewing it. What. A. Journey. Big props to CBR Bingo for being the catalyst for me getting me out of this backlog and writing slump… The titular Henna Artist (Lakshmi) is a shadow in that she disappeared from her village and has been building a name for herself in the upper social circles of Jaipur as a henna artist. Her past catches […]

“The Circus has a great obligation to the people of America.” (Irving Feld)

Tiger, Tiger: My 25 Years with the Big Cats by Charly Baumann

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CBR14Bingo: Star (Charly clearly sees himself as a star, and he was) This was a pretty fast and straight forward autobiography of Charly Baumann’s twenty-five years of circus life. It’s not the type of autobiography where the author does a lot of introspection, but it’s an enjoyable read and a good look into European and American circus post-WWII and into the 1970s. His descriptions of his training methods and the long, difficult process of carefully training tigers was interesting. There are also a lot of […]

“how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware”

Milkman by Anna Burns

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CBR Bingo Square: Monster Damn, y’all. Yes, my summer of Irish fiction continues. Though I’ve had Anna Burns’s Milkman on my shelf for…maybe close to two years?…it’s a read I just kept putting off, and then I let my Instagram friends decide what novel I was gonna read next and this was the winner. Burns won the Booker Prize for this novel in 2018, and I can see why. (Sidebar: As much as I appreciate Margaret Atwood, the daring and deftness of what Burns accomplishes here […]

The Three S-s: spooky, sad, and a little bit sexy

The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel

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Honestly, what else could you need? If you are our Heroine Leigh Wells, you need quite a bit. You’ve been called back to your ancestral island home, far flung from the wild shores of Scotland. World War Two did not hit your home directly, but it stole many young men and sent very few back home. The few that returned are not who they once were. The island is not what it once was. The Sluagh (sloo-ah) still return every October, but every year they […]



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