Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s Only a Matter Of…

Trust by Hernan Diaz

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Read as part of CBR14Bingo: Dough. The book involves a man who makes a lot of money (“dough”) off the stock market in the 20s and 30s and how stories revolve around him. I was excited to get this one given both the premise and reviews. I have a yen for these kinds of neo-Gatsby stories set in the early part of the 20th century that examine finance and/or gangsterism juxtaposed with the American Dream. Legs by William Kennedy qualifies for this label, as does Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan […]

Despite the title of the book, this was not a good time

Bacchanal by Veronica G. Henry

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BINGO – Travel The G. B. Bacchanal Carnival is a travelling carnival that makes stops all around the Great Depression Era South. They have everything a carnival should: tasty treats, games that may or may not be rigged, dangerous feats from dazzling performers, and oddities from around the world. This carnival just happens to be owned by a demon from the underworld who feeds on children’s souls trying to find the one person who can stop her. Liza Meeks is the newest addition to the […]

Mine eyes have seen the glory

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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Buckle up, this one is pretty long.  I finished this book a few days ago and the impression it made on me was so visceral, I had to wait to write about it.   When I consider what it takes to be a classic, regardless of the medium, my first thought is timelessness.  Will this item stand the test of time and all that entails?  I believe that the term classic is bandied about too often and too frivolously. We call anything that we like […]

The Outsiders

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Capital ‘L’ literature puzzles me as I often feel that it’s a giant waste of time while I’m in the middle, but then I get to the end and reflect on it, and I realize that having read the book was worthwhile. This sentiment couldn’t be more true than my feeling on finishing “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” On a surface perspective, I read 350 pages in which nothing really happened and the characters went nowhere. But on a deeper inspection, the pages roil with […]

Alli Reviews “The Lonely Hearts Hotel”

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I think I might need to start making a list of where I heard about certain books, that way once they are finally available at the e-library I will know why I wanted to read them in the first place. This book overall was fairly good, but it was strange an a bit manipulative and I wonder who told me to read it. “The Lonely Hearts Hotel” is a book set in and around the Great Depression and follows the lives of two orphans in […]

A war, depression, and a sociopath. And three other books not about the 2016 election.

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64. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W. Toll (5 stars) The Pacific Crucible examines the naval war in the Pacific theater of WWII from Pearl Harbor to Midway, and traces its origins back to the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s seminal book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. This is the first in a nonfiction trilogy about the Pacific theater of WWII. The second, The Conquering Tide, was published in 2015. I think it’s a fairly stellar book about […]



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