Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I expected too much

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

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CBR15 BINGO: On the Road, because the fig tree at the center of this story travels from Cyprus to London; also, main character Ada is on the path to understanding her family’s history, and Ada’s parents are immigrants from Cyprus BINGO: Hold Steady, On the Road, North America, Guide, Nostalgia I need to stop reading Goodreads reviews that gush over a novel, because they only set me up for disappointment. I wanted to like this novel so much more than I did, because there are […]

“Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.”

The Art of the Memoir by Mary Karr

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CBR 15 Bingo – North America I was gifted this book for my 40th birthday as I had made it known to many of my friends that I started working on my own memoir-ish book. In the time since I started my book, I have stopped and started and stalled many times over so I waited months to crack this open, as it sat taunting me, bursting with the expertise of the lauded memoirist Mary Karr. When I finally got over myself and begrudgingly and […]

Excellent short story collection

Walking on Cowrie Shells: Stories by Nana Nkweti

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CBR15bingo Africa This book was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African writing  This 2021 collection of 10 short stories, Nana Nkweti’s debut work, is a riveting read. Each story is thought provoking, some are shocking, all are brilliantly written. This is the kind of book you could read quickly but it deserves to be savored.  Nana Nkweti is a Cameroonian American writer, and her stories focus on the experience of being a “hyphenated American.” For some who have come to the US from […]

CBR15 Bingo: Politics

Jingo by Terry Pratchett

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4.5 stars CBR15 Bingo: Politics (the word is used 18 times over the course of the novel) Official book description: It isn’t much of an island that rises up one moonless night from the depths of the Circle Sea — just a few square miles of silt and some old ruins. Unfortunately, the historically disputed lump of land called Leshp is once again floating directly between Ankh-Morpork and the city of Al-Khali on the coast of Klatch — which is spark enough to ignite that […]

“A person immersed in the realities of family life did not stop to ponder the meaning of life: that person was in life, up to his or her neck and beyond. The family was the beginning, the future, and the past.”

Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin

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CBR Bingo – Adulthood Laurie Colwin is a writer I had never heard of, but this book was gifted to me by my husband who heard about it on an NPR interview when another author said it was their favorite book of all time and he thought I might like it (I know, so sweet. Don’t tell him I told you). This book will not race to the top of my “favorite of all time” list but I did enjoy it and am glad to […]

Rogues, the whole lot of them.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Last year I did a Patrick Radden Keefe double-header: Say Nothing and Empire of Pain. It was… a doozy. Keefe writes incredibly well (he’s got a slew of awards to prove it) and excels at deep dives into larger-than-life personalities. When Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks went on sale on Chirp I scooped it up. Rogues is a collection of Keefe’s previous writings for The New Yorker. Keefe describes in his preface how journalists often develop a lane, and while he […]



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