Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“There is a pay phone by a truck stop near the town of Leonard, Arizona. Sometimes at night it starts to ring.”

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

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I was first drawn into Emily St. John Mandel’s world back in 2015, when Station Eleven caught my eye after popping up in a few “best of” lists.  It became an immediate favorite, and I know that love is shared here within our CBR community! I’ve read it twice since first picking it up, most recently in March, right as the world started to dip further and further into pandemic horror. I wrote in a previous review that I would not have picked up The Glass Hotel […]

Bingo! (CBR12Bingo 2: Book club)

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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I was wondering how I was going to make a book club pick twice, as I’m not much of a joiner and my coworker book club basically meets every six months once we ask for extensions … and more extensions … and plan to get together and cancel those plans…. so no way we were going to have the next pick ready in time. And I am going to do my level best not to use the reader’s choice square, because this is a challenge […]

“Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives”

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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I don’t know, really, what I was expecting from this book and I’m also not sure that whatever those expectations were that they were met. I was able to watch an author discussion between Mandel and Isaac Fitzgerald hosted by the Greenlight bookstore in the spring when this book was released and I left that experience knowing that the book featured a Ponzi scheme and focused around the 2008 economic collapse, and that a main character died and also that estrangement of many types was […]

Book Club Discussion: The Glass Hotel

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Our third and final book club of the year has arrived, and I’m excited to see what everyone has to think about Emily St. John Mandel’s latest The Glass Hotel. For those of you who might be joining in for #CannonBookClub for the first time (hello new friends!) all are welcome, and you don’t need to be registered* for this year’s Read to speak your mind. For the boilerplate: ground rules remain the same as they always have. The topics are numbered, and we ask […]

Reminder: The Glass Hotel #CannonBookClub is Coming Soon

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Our third and final book club of the year will be October 16 and 17 and we’re circling back around to Emily St. John Mandel and her newest book, The Glass Hotel which was released earlier this year. The Glass Hotel is described as: …a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it. So, if […]

“Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives”

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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Bingo Square: Book Club This is a difficult book to describe, as shown by the blurb which I found almost impenetrable and which doesn’t do it justice. Mostly it’s about a young woman named Vincent, and how she becomes involved with Jonathan Alkaitis, a very successful businessman who is actually running a Ponzi scheme. We also meet several of his investors, and see how they are affected when the scheme collapses and Alkaitis is arrested. As a young teen, Vincent’s mother drowns in a canoeing […]



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