Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 […]

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 […]

Dated and hard to stomach (DNF)

Rivals by Jilly Cooper

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This novel from the 1980s was recently turned into a series on Disney+ of all places. I watched it because it has a bunch of actors I really like in it, including David Tennant and Aiden Turner (who is sporting a ridiculous Super Mario mustache). If you miss the 1980s and enjoy adult, “Dallas” style TV, you should check it out. The first scene is two people having sex in the lavatory on the Concorde and a few scenes later we get full frontal male […]

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!

Upworthy Good People: Stories From the Best of Humanity by Gabriel Reilich, Lucia Knell

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I’ve had this book for a few months and now felt like the exact right time to read it. It would make a lovely holiday gift for someone on your list or for yourself. Upworthy is a popular contributor on social media, featuring stories of kindness submitted by the public. This volume, published by National Geographic, is a compilation of those stories divided into six chapters. The stories are mostly short — from a paragraph to 2-3 pages — but every one of them is […]

An extraordinary friendship (cannonball!)

The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien by John Hendrix

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The Mythmakers is a graphic story written for middle schoolers and older. The narrators of this biography/history are a lion (CS Lewis) and a Wizard (JRR Tolkien). The Mythmakers covers the life stories of each man in brief as well as going into detail on their ideas about storytelling and myths. Lewis and Tolkien shared some remarkable things in common but clearly they were two very different men whose friendship inspired them to write their greatest works. Yet their differences (other relationships, perhaps jealousy, differences […]



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