Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

But who ever really knows the experience of another?

Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout

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CBR14: Scandal square (I may be overreaching because this book is not about a singular scandal but it’s full of scandalous behavior: spouse & child abandonment, serial infidelity, and Nazis. Many skeletons in fancy walk-in closets.) This book is Strout’s third novel in the “Amgash Series” about a character named Lucy Barton. A fourth in the series is expected to be published this year. I did not read the proceeding two novels because I didn’t know this was part of a series. In any event, in […]

Blackout (of a character and on the bingo card)

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

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Cbr14bingo Gaslight/Bingo Blackout  Action takes place during and in decades prior to WWI. A couple of characters struggle to believe the truth and question each other’s reliability. The Return of the Soldier is a novella that exposes the iniquities of Britain’s class system against the backdrop of World War I. It is a heartbreaking love story that focuses on the women in one soldier’s life as he convalesces following an unusual injury in France. This story features four main characters. The injured soldier, Captain Chris […]

One Bad Day

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

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Cbr14bingo Scandal/bingo  Published in 1988 generated controversy for its violence, treatment of Barbara Gordon, Moore’s later criticism of his own. See this story in the Guardian. Batman: The Killing Joke, published in 1988, has had enormous influence on Batman movies and seems to be the generally accepted version of the Joker’s origin story. While I haven’t seen all of the Batman movies, as I read this graphic novel, I recognized that Hollywood has largely adopted Alan Moore’s story as canon. Moore himself in subsequent years […]

Putting the fun in dysfunctional

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

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Cbr14bingo Holiday/bingo Holidays on Ice is a collection of David Sedaris essays, some previously published and some new, all related to holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Halloween are all represented through autobiographical reflections as well as imaginative fictional stories. If you are unfamiliar with Sedaris, you should know that his writing is both hilarious and often shocking. He has a talent for making very inappropriate and unsettling statements but often in such a funny way that you laugh anyway. Like many people I became familiar […]

Good Cop/Bad Cat

The Eloquent Scribe: The Sitehuti and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet Series Book 1 by T. Lee Harris

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Cbr14bingo Font The main character is an Egyptian scribe turned investigator The Eloquent Scribe is the first book in a mystery series set in ancient Egypt and features a pair of unlikely investigators — Sitehuti the junior scribe and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet (aka Neffi), the sacred cat of the Temple of Bastet in capital city Pi-Ramesses. While the “mystery” in this novel is pretty straight forward and not terribly hard to solve for the reader, the charm of the story is in the characters and the potential […]

Angry Mothers Raise Daughters Fierce Enough to Fight Wolves

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

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Reviews for the Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo! I’m reviewing in the order they were published, but they are connected by place rather than plot, and can be read in any order.   The Empress of Salt and Fortune Chih is a cleric of the Singing Hills Monastery who travels the world to catalog, record, and document histories. Rabbit is the former servant of the exiled empress In-Yo. As Chih catalogs the contents of Rabbit’s house, Rabbit shares with them bits of stories related […]



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