Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Four legs good, two legs bad”

Animal Farm by George Orwell

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Nowhere Books Bingo 25: Banned Book Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Cover featuring an animal On Manor Farm, somewhere in England, an old boar gathers all the animals in the barn and makes a powerful speech about how animals suffer at the hands of humans and should rise up and take power for themselves. Shortly after his death, the animals of Manor Farm do just that – they violently fight back when Farmer Jones and his farmhands try to control them and chase the farmer, his […]

“I must make up my mind which is right – society or I”

Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House) by Henrik Ibsen

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I don’t know if a spoiler warning for a nearly 150-year-old play is necessary – but I will be revealing significant plot points when writing about this historical drama, so if you want to remain unspoiled, go read the play (it’s only three acts, it’s a relatively quick read) or watch a dramatisation, and come back when you’re done. Nora and Torvald Helmer are a middle-class couple living in Christiania (what Oslo was named for a few centuries in the before times) in the late […]

Two Writers

We Are Watching by Alison Gaylin

Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

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I finished two books this past week and enjoyed them to varying degrees. One was by a favorite author, another by an author I’ve struggled with in the past. Let’s get to the latter first since I like going in reading order… We Are Watching**** I’ve always felt cold toward Alison Gaylin’s work. She’s a very good writer and yet, there’s an emotional distance in her books that I can’t land with. It’s the same issue I get when watching most Christopher Nolan movies: yeah […]

“For four years we spied and we worked damn hard and we saved people’s lives and we made a difference and nobody cared too much that we were women. And then it all ended.”

The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre by Natasha Lester

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Ex-OSS agent Alix St. Pierre seeks a fresh start in Paris as the PR agent for the freshly established House of Dior, but her actions and enemies from during the war continue to dog her steps. This was the oldest NetGalley ARC on my shelf, so it’s with a real sense of satisfaction that I’m crossing it off the list. And it was fun to see yet another fresh perspective on World War Two, that of a female OSS agent, and better yet to see […]

What do you get when you mix 1930s New York with advice from a Founding Father?

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

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Being able to submerge readers in a particular era/time/place is one of Amor Towles’s super powers. Whether it’s early 20th century Russia, or the 1950s American midwest, readers can expect to feel and breathe an era through Towles’ expertly crafted prose. In Rules of Civility, Towles’s debut novel, we find ourselves transported to New York in the late 1930s, just as the city is starting to see the light at the end of a grueling decade, a decade that “launched the Great Depression just to […]

“The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, more than 7000 Athenian prisoners of war are left to rot in Syracuse’s quarries – except a select few whom unemployed Syracusan potters Lampo and Gelon decide will be perfect to mount a pair of plays by the great tragic playwright Euripides. You might have to reread that premise. It’s a pretty whacky one, though some mild trawling of Wikipedia later revealed to me that allegedly some Athenian prisoners in Sicily did buy their freedom by reciting Euripides […]



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