Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A charming and amusing romp that greatly entertained me, even though I couldn’t care less about birds, and actually sort of fear them

The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love by India Holton

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Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Only one bed (and horse) CBR16 Bingo: And also… (Repeat of the Bananas square, because this book fits the bill) Beth Pickering is the youngest professor of ornithology at Oxford, and she needs to really impress the faculty if she is to get tenure. She works with wealthy widow Hippolyta Quirm to try to locate and capture rare (and usually dangerous) birds. Just as they are about to capture the coveted deathwhistler, a rival ornithologist, the dashing young Professor Devon Lockley […]

Confusing, but fun

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

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Nowhere Book Bingo: Award Winner (Won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1998, plus a bunch of others) Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Scene on a boat or body of water (there’s a lot of rowing on the river) CBR16 Bingo: Tech (time travel requires pretty specific technology) This is the second book in the Oxford Time Travel series, but you really don’t need to have read the first one, Doomsday Book, to understand and enjoy this one. In the universe these books are set in, […]

Fake marriage and further hijinks

The Secret Service of Tea and Treason by India Holton

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Alice Dearlove works for the secret organisation the Agency of Undercover Note Takers, or A.U.N.T., staffed by spies and agents disguised as ladies’ maids, butlers, footmen, and other household staff who mostly go unnoticed by the higher classes, but are usually in a position to see and hear everything. She’s one of their top agents, known within A.U.N.T only as Agent A. Usually, Miss Dearlove works alone and gets excellent results while doing so. Now she faces one of the biggest challenges of her career. […]

“As Charlotte plummeted to the ground, still locked in Alex’s arms, she recollected Miss Plim’s warning that kissing a man was bad for one’s health.”

The League of Gentlewomen Witches by India Holton

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4.5 stars Everyone knows there’s no such thing as witches, but if there were, they probably wouldn’t use magic in flashy and extravagant ways to fly houses around and try to rob and assassinate one another. If there were witches, they would probably use their magic in tidier ways, ensuring polite society was functioning properly. Possibly liberate those who have excessive financial resources of some of it to the betterment of those with less of it (like say, themselves). If there were witches, Charlotte Pettifer […]

“We put so much effort into it, and I tanked it by being a horny goblin.”

Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

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#CBR15 Passport Challenge: Recommended by a friend (I’m not sure if I would have ever discovered this book if it wasn’t for the amazing Narfna/Ashley A lot of contemporary romances get described as rom-coms, and in a lot of cases this is just lies, spouted by the publishers to get more people to pick up the books. Make You Mine This Christmas, on the other hand, is both romantic and very funny. I could easily see it as a film in my head. Haf (it’s […]

CBR15 Bingo: Europe (triple Bingo)

Folk med ångest (Anxious People) by Fredrik Backman

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#CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries (set in and written by a Swedish author, read in Swedish) CBR15 Bingo: Europe (see description for Passport Challenge) Official book description (translated by me): Folk med ångest (literally translated as People with anxiety, official English title Anxious People) is an unusually messy comedy about a hostage drama during an apartment showing, where a failed bank robber locks themselves in with an overly enthusiastic realtor, two bitter IKEA-addicts, a mean multimillionaire, a sad lady, a very pregnant woman, […]



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