Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An excellent book but not my cup of tea

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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I read Gods of Jade and Shadow and thought it was enjoyable, so I was excited to read Mexican Gothic.  I’m not sure my expectations were met. Noemi is a socialite in the upper-class of 1950s Mexico City. She goes to parties, she flirts, she wears beautiful gowns because she actually enjoys them, and she wants to go university against her family’s wishes. Noemi’s life gets upended when her father asks her to go check on her cousin Catalina who has written a strange and disturbing […]

Drop whatever you’re doing and read this book right now

The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan

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Disclaimer! This was an ARC granted to me by the author, which has in no way influenced my review. I had also pre-ordered the books many months ago, because Courtney Milan is an auto-buy for me, every time. Amelia Smith is a Chinese woman raised by English missionaries in China. When she was just a little girl, her birth mother, a woman fleeing during one of the many conflicts in the country, asked Mrs. Acheson, the woman who Amelia has thought of as her mother […]

My 2,000th Review!

The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2) by Seth Dickinson

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I should say, it’s my 2,000th review written, not posted, since I started reviewing books in 2008. This one’s been holding me up. Baru Cormorant is one of those series where you really have to be in the right mood. And you have to make sure to take the time to let the story breathe. At least for me, this isn’t a book you can just read straight through in a matter of days, or even in a week. It’s too raw and stressful and […]

lovely, stinking, brutal, sunburned, magical, and filthy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jacob de Zoet is a young man of meager means. He has hitched his hopes to the Dust East India Company- he’ll spend several trading seasons on Dejima- about as far away from home and his fiancée as he can physically be. What is Dejima? Why, I’m glad you asked! The year is 1799, and Japan is very strict in regards to foreign interference and influence. Following disasters interactions with the Spanish and Portuguese decades earlier, Japan is a closed empire. Dejima, a man-made island […]

“With a return ticket, courage becomes an intellectual exercise.”

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

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From 1951-54, Graham Greene was a foreign correspondent in French Indochina.  Contrary to the belief of some, Edward Lansdale (a pioneer of American intelligence operations) was not the inspiration for the character of Pyle (the titular Quiet American). Greene instead based the character on a man named Leo Hochstetter, with whom he shared a room and traveled to Saigon from Ben Tre. Hochstetter lectured Greene on finding a “third force” in Vietnam: a democratic alternative to colonialism and communism. The Quiet American takes place in […]

Six Drinks and A Few Empires

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

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I need to clean off my coffee table. I remembered something from A History of the World in 6 Glasses, but then couldn’t find the book to confirm it. I figured maybe I’d finished it way earlier than I thought and had given it away. But no, it was just buried under stuff on the coffee table. Turns out, I hadn’t quite finished it either. The premise is a history of cultural development around the world as it connects to the general history of the […]



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