Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Father of Mine

Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm

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Read as part of cbr14 bingo: birds. There are birds on the cover of the book. Bill Loehfelm is a writer that deserves to be celebrated more than he is. I remember picking up The Devil She Knows more out of curiosity than excitement. I wanted to see how Loehfelm would bring Staten Island to life. What I got instead was one of the best crime novels I’ve read the last few years. I got caught up in Maureen’s story. I followed her to New Orleans and while […]

“Kim was starlight and privilege; Will had his feet firmly fixed in the mud. They didn’t belong together. Except they did.”

Subtle Blood by K.J. Charles

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CBR14 Bingo: Scandal (the book features corruption, blackmail, kidnapping, and murder – not to mention gay people in the 1920s. Gasp!) Spoiler warning! This is the third book in a trilogy. While you can absolutely read this book without the others, you will not get all the beautiful payoff from various earlier storylines that way. Also, this review will contain mild spoilers for earlier in the series. Start with Slippery Creatures. For the last few months, Lord Arthur “Kim” Secretan and Will Darling have actually […]

“Vulnerability is not oversharing, it’s sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.”

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brene Brown

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In one word: Mind-Altering Cannonball Read Bingo: Heart I was already a big Brene Brown fan before I opened this book, so I knew to steel myself for something that was going to teach me, challenge me, and break my brain a little bit. Guess what? That’s exactly what happened! This is not something to read cover to cover but is a manual for understanding and navigating emotions. It’s a good read, great even, but it took me over four months to read by design; […]

That’s not sparkle. It’s rage-glitter.

The Twelve Dates of Christmas by Jenny Bayliss

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CBR14 BINGO: Holiday square (BINGO! Cold to Holiday BINGO! Gaslight to Elephant. BLACKOUT!!!) (Christmas romance is about as holiday as you can get, I think, and a great way to hit the bingo blackout.) I love holiday romance movies. All of them. I can snort-laugh while I wrap presents when half watching the really terrible ones. I can snuggle up on the couch under my twinkle lights and fall right into the good ones. I can hunt down and bookmark the 10 or so that I have to watch every […]

Men, Follow Your Dreams! Women, errr- just keep on keeping on

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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I feel like The Alchemist was a ship that I missed when it first sailed many years ago- it was such a sensation that tabloids showed all sorts of famous people (Bill Clinton!) reading it and it was optioned for an (as yet unmade) film. So here I am, reading it only 30 years late. The Alchemist is a very slim novel, just over 150 generously spaced pages. It follows Santiago, a shepherd boy from Andalusia who follows his dream of finding treasure under the […]

The Woman, The Myth, The Legend

Cleopatra, A Life by Stacey Schiff

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When in Egypt, amirite? I was going to pit this as a battle of two Cleopatra books with the Shakespeare play but it turns out I had a lot to say so I ended up splitting them. For the best I think, as they’re both so different- Shakespeare’s play is one layer in the myths of this real historical woman that Schiff is trying to dig through. In that context, Shakespeare is maybe one of the best known mythmakers; his play helped carry the myth […]



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