Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

You’ve heard of Queen for a Day? This is Duchess for a Month.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

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CBR 17 BINGO: School, because Helene has Trinity and Oriel Colleges in Oxford on her must-see list and has a hissy fit when she almost doesn’t get to see them BINGO: School, Diaspora, G, Border, Work One of the surprising benefits of stumbling upon a beautiful, used copy of 84, Charing Cross Road is that it prompted me to read Helene Hanff’s follow-up memoir, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. I hadn’t known this book existed until very recently. Apparently, after 84, Charing Cross Road was […]

Books about books are the best kinds of books

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

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CBR 17 BINGO: Favorite (revisiting this old favorite for Bingo) BINGO: Favorite, Red, Family, Border, Green Visiting local bookshops is standard practice whenever my husband and I go on vacation. Recently in Vancouver, we wandered into a store called MacLeod’s Books, which is one of those places where you can easily get lost among the piles. Books are roughly organized into genres, but each section is overwhelmed with stacks and stacks of volumes spilling over from the shelves. This is the type of place where […]

Gals being literary rivals, then pals, then more?

Ladies in Hating by Alexandra Vasti

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Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and Netgalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. Lady Georgiana Cleeve was disowned by her father when she announced that she was the author of several popular novels, and has lived alone with her mother ever since, cut off from all contact with her brothers, convinced that the scandal she brought on herself and her family would irrevocably tarnish the reputations of anyone connected to her. She is selling well and her books are popular, but for […]

This memoir legitimately deserves 5 stars, but I’m too angry to give it a rating yet

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

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CBR 17 BINGO: “G” (for Glass) Back in 2019, I recommended Educated to my sister. After she read and enjoyed (not sure that’s the right word) it , she asked me whether I’d ever read The Glass Castle. “In some ways, it’s worse,” she told me. I finally got around to reading The Glass Castle, and I understand now where she was coming from. While Tara Westover’s parents were consistently ignorant and controlling, the parents of Jeanette Walls were people of dichotomy. Her father was […]

The Good, the Bad and the Horny

Apprentice to the Villain: A Novel by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

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Apprentice to the Villain is the second of four projected Villain novels (#3 is out now) and continues the romance/fantasy of Evie Sage and Trystan Maverine, aka the Villain. At the end of book one, Evie’s world has been turned on its head. Her boss Trystan has been captured by the evil King Benedict and he thinks Evie is dead. Evie and the rest of the crew at Massacre Manor  have to come up with a plan to get the boss back and save the […]

What Love Story?

Liquid: A Love Story by Mariam Rahmani

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Our unnamed narrator is a post-doc struggling to find even adjunct-level jobs in the cutthroat world of academia. When she’s told that she’s not getting a single course in the fall, her best friend Adam – a marketer by day and poet by night – suggests she just try marrying rich. It’s a joke, but our narrator takes it seriously. She sets herself the task of going on 100 dates over the course of the summer, with the goal being a proposal (or at least […]



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