Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

And it stuns me silent, for a moment: just how vast the gap is between who I am and how people see me.

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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CBR15 BINGO: (Hold Steady Square: The main character here desperately tries to hold steady. She is terrible at it.) This is a little like Daisy Jones and the Six but with tennis, and I’m not mad about it. Not trying to diminish Jenkins Reid’s writing here at all. She has a lane and she is staying in it: complex female characters who are unapologetically who they are. Can they learn from their mistakes? Sure. Can they open up a little and let people in? They can. What they […]

“Honor without intelligence is a disaster. Honor could lose the war.”

The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War by Michael Shaara

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Cbr13bingo violence I read The Killer Angels about 20 years ago, and my lasting recollection was that I was surprised at how it drew me in and how much I liked it. Surprised because this novel, a work of historical fiction, is focused on the most momentous battle of the Civil War – Gettysburg. As much as I enjoy history and historical fiction, military history has never been terribly interesting to me. Michael Shaara accomplished something amazing with this novel: he made me interested in […]

How incompetent must a man be to turn a simple hymen breaching into one of the biggest Society scandals in years?

A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

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CBR15 PASSPORT (Stamp #14 : Books From Different Countries. International Waters count I think?) CBR15 BINGO (Relation “ship” Square: Takes place on an actual ship, all sorts of relationships: mother/daughter, romantic, friendship) The seventh novel in Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series is steeped, as they all are, in gender and class politics. Reputation goes hand in glove with those themes and this book really does a deep dive into those murky waters. Again, this is the 7th in the series so spoilers abound. On the run from […]

You weren’t a son, but you are everything you ought to be.

Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls

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CBR15 BINGO: (Politics Square: the politics of prohibition, organized crime, and a family dynasty running ALL of the politics of a rural Virginia town) I’m a big fan of Jeannette Walls so this one was put on hold at the library before its publication. Set in rural Virginia during Prohibition, it seemed right up my alley. Give me a flapper, some bathtub gin (or in this case, moonshine), some small-town organized crime, and digging in! Walls’ does write about what she knows in terms of setting. […]

I have been a character and I have been a narrator, but now I don’t know what I am.

Or What You Will by Jo Walton

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CBR15 PASSPORT (Stamp #13: Different Genres, Metafiction) CB515BINGO: (Europe square. Takes place in Florence, Italy. The city is very much a character in the book.) This is the right book for the right person but I am not that right person. Trying to summarize the plot here is going to be problematic because there are a lot of threads weaving this story. Here goes. A woman, Sylvia, is living in Florence, Italy as she nears the end of her battle with cancer. Sylvia is a successful author […]

Perhaps every generation passes to the next…an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk’s contents to the young and never open it.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

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CBR15 BINGO: (Bodies, Bodies Bodies square. Deals with the process of aging and death) Annie Dillard’s writing is gorgeous, layered and poetic. I read The Living years and years ago and still, when asked what my favorite books of all time are, it is on the top of that list. I can only remember basic points about the plot but I remember, very vividly, how reading that book made me feel. This is Dillard’s only other work of fiction and, while set in a different […]



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