Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A historical romance with ice smugglers (bingo)

Brazen and the Beast by Sarah Maclean

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#CBR11 Bingo: History Schmistory (set in the Victorian era) On the eve of her twenty-ninth birthday, Lady Henrietta “Hattie” Sedly, aided by her best friend Lady Eleonora (Nora), the daughter of a duke, is planning on going to an exclusive brothel in Covent Garden catering to women. She needs to lose her virginity, so her father will stop trying to pressure her into marriage. Firmly on the shelf, Hattie has discovered that despite a generous dowry, no one actually wants to marry her. She’s too tall, […]

I sure read a lot of books for someone who can’t flipping read. (History/Schmistory)

Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation by Jeff Chang

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So I picked this up thinking it was a history of Hip Hop, and after about two hundred pages of thorough descriptions of various gangs in New York city, the history of Reggae, the ramifications of the loss of social programs on urban youth, and a couple of paragraphs about Afrika Bambaataa, I stopped and looked back at the front cover. It’s a history of the hip hop GENERATION. It’s not what I was expecting and I have no one but myself to thank for […]

“I have no interest in your orders, I have no interest in what was legal at the time”

The Huntress by Kate Quinn

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Bingo Square: History Schmistory Kate Quinn’s follow up to The Alice Network once again follows multiple timelines and perspectives, though the timelines are much closer together this time around and involve three people.  After a short prologue which includes the only part from the perspective of the titular huntress and a newspaper article introducing the war crimes the huntress committed during World War II, the novel alternates between the character views of Jordan, a teenage girl living in 1946 Boston.  Her widowed father, an antiquarian, […]

Born Under an Evil Star

Mademoiselle de Scudéri by E.T.A. Hoffmann

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In 1680, 73-year-old Mademoiselle de Scudéri is a respected poet at the court of Louis XIV in Paris. She inadvertently becomes involved in solving a series of murders and robberies that have mostly wealthy gentlemen as their targets who are on their way to their mistresses with expensive jewellery.  These crimes have plagued the city for some time and the authorities are anxious to solve them. First published in 1819, this is generally acknowledged as the first German crime fiction story, with the Mademoiselle at […]

Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

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CBR11Bingo – History Schmistory This is a wonderful and strange novel in which a biography is tracing the history of a young courtier in Elizabethan England who both makes his way into the future (present in the book) though time, and also becomes a woman in her 30s by the end. I don’t know if I have a lot more to add to the conversations surrounding this book in terms of adding useful discourse. I am no Virginia Woolf scholar or have spent enough time […]



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