Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Maybe You Shouldn’t Start a Series With the Penultimate Novel

X by Sue Grafton

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Despite enjoying plenty of grocery store detective novels in my younger years (James Patterson, Michael Connolly, etc.) I had somehow never read anything by Sue Grafton. I knew of her, of course, and her alphabet-themed series of detective novels, but for whatever reason had never picked one up. Well, for the 2024 PopSugar reading challenge, I had to read a book starting with the letter X. I had started reading a different book, and was struggling with maintaining interest, and decided to switch it up. […]

A Ghost Story

The Voyage Home: A Novel (Women of Troy Book 3) by Pat Barker

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The Voyage Home is Pat Barker’s final installment in her Women of Troy trilogy. The first two novels, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, take on the events of The Iliad and imagine them from the point of view of the vanquished, in particular from the point of view of the Trojan women who became enslaved to the victorious Greek armies. The princess Briseis, who became Achilles’ concubine/slave, was the primary focus of those novels, which were brutally realistic in their […]

I seem to read a lot of novels about grief

After You’d Gone: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell has a knack for writing about grief. All of the novels of hers that I have read have dealt with strong-willed, unusual women, their love lives, and their grief and sorrow (Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox). After You’d Gone is O’Farrell’s first novel and while perhaps not as polished or finished as her later works, it still kept me glued to the text and broke my heart. It is the story of 29-year-old Alice Raikes who, when the […]

Thank you, CoffeeShopReader!

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Thank you for the wonderful package of goodies!  The second half of 2024 has required lighter reading, with romance and cozy vibes.  I’m looking forward to continuing that trend with a YA sapphic romance that features mystical creatures.  The journal is adorable and my puzzle loving 16 year old has already made off with the fidget puzzle.  I look forward to trying the various warm drinks while reading. It also gave me the chance to use a personalized book embosser that I was just gifted:)

Grief, murder and more grief

The Maidens: A Novel by Alex Michaelides

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I tore through this novel over the weekend. It’s a psychological thriller and murder mystery set at Cambridge University. “The Maidens” are an informal sorority of students whose leader/father figure is an American professor of classics named Edward Fosca. When a beautiful “maiden” named Tara is found brutally murdered just off campus, psychotherapist Mariana Andros rushes to the university to comfort her niece Zoe, Tara’s best friend. Mariana is convinced that despite his alibi, Fosca is behind the murder, especially when the body of another […]



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