Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“All I’ve ever tried to do is the right thing. If that’s so very different from how things have been done before, then what’s done before was wrong.”

To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose

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CBR16 Bingo: Smash – This book combines elements of fantasy (dragons) and science fiction (steampunk). The cultures depicted also smash and clash together throughout the book. All Anequs wants to do is live in peace with her tribe, content to be ignored by the Anglish conquerers who’ve taken over most of the continent. However, when she bonds with the first dragon to hatch on their island in generations, she must attend their academy and adapt to their ways if she hopes to keep her dragon. This […]

February-March 2024 Leftovers

The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones

A Lowcountry Bride by Preslaysa Williams

Bone White by Ronald Malfi

Alexander the Great by Phillip Freeman

Nero: Matricide, Murder and Music in Imperial Rome by Anthony Everitt and Roddy Ashworth

Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James

A Stab in the Dark by Lawrence Block

The Killing Kind by John Connolly

Shōgun by James Clavell

Nobody's Angel by Jack Clark

A Murder in Hollywood: The Untold Story of Tinseltown's Most Shocking Crime by Casey Sherman

Village in the Dark by Iris Yamashita

Nestlings by Nat Cassidy

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland

The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age by Michael Woolraich

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Rain, rain, go away. I thought my reading count looked too low and then I realized I didn’t do leftovers for February, so here’s Feb-March combined. The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and Rise of the Tudors ***** Jones is such a talented historian. Gets all the important stuff of the Wars of the Roses in great detail and lets the story entertain. His Templars book will soon be on my radar. A Lowcountry Bride**** Had to read this for a library […]

Colonialism Lives!

The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain's Colonial Legacy by Philippe Sands

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CBR 15 Bingo – Africa: This book is about the Chagos Archipelago, which is a part of Mauritius, as well as the aftereffects of colonial legacy in Africa more generally. In the 1960s, Britain created its last colony when it detached the Chagos Islands from the fledgling nation of Mauritius, forcibly deporting the residents whose families have lived there for centuries. Philippe Sands, who was one of the lawyers representing Mauritius at the World Court, tells the story of how this came to be, and the […]

Around the world in 72 days – and more than that

19th Century Female Explorers by Caroline Roope

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CBR 15 Bingo – In the Wild: The women of this book ventured into the wild spaces of pretty much very continent at some point or another. In the heyday of European colonialism, social mores were constrained for women, who were expected to stay domestic and tend hearth and home. Despite this, many European women managed to go traveling around the world on just as exciting adventures as their males counterparts did, and often recorded what they saw with clearer eyes as well. Truth is […]

might not be the book you think it is, but it might be the book you need

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang

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Man oh man do people dislike this book! And when they do, they seem to dislike it for all sorts of suspicious reasons. Oh, white/western person, do you think the main characters in this book, the majority of whom are from colonies, spend a little bit too much time griping about the evils of the British colonial empire? Well then, boy do I have some news that’s going to REALLY disturb you about non-fictional humans in the real world who were once subjugated by the […]

The Necessity of Violence

Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Revolution by R.F. Kuang

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I think my mixed feelings are going to come out so I’ll say up front that this is way outside of what I usually read, and while I appreciated that it is a very good book, I often didn’t enjoy reading it. I appreciate it more than I love it. But, I think it’s a worthwhile read. Maybe don’t pick it up right after you put down a book that owns your whole heart. This book is also in conversation with The Secret History and […]



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