Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Wedding belle

Once Upon a Wedding by Nancy Millar

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Last year I read a graveyard themed Nancy Millar history book (Remember Me as I Pass By) and this year I turned to something lighter, a book about weddings in western Canada. Like Remember Me, Once Upon a Wedding is armchair-light history, a brief romp back through western Canadian weddings from the 1800s through to the 1940s. Millar’s eye is drawn to newspaper announcements of weddings, old family photos and heirloom wedding dresses, and I once again did a lot of googling to see if […]

Bingo Blackout with Chrysanthemums!

Chrysanthemums by Twigs Way

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Bingo 25: Flora I have to admit I was starting to despair about having to use a gardening book from the library which didn’t interest me for the Flora square, but then I found this: In case you can’t see under the library sticker, the title is Chrysanthemums. Also, am I the only one wondering if that’s a pen name or just really fortuitous coincidence for the author? This is supposed to be a cultural and horticultural history, which is super interesting since I know […]

Unearthing History

In the Memory of the Forest: A Novel by Charles T. Powers

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Cbr13bingo Landscape, bingo #6 and #7; Cannonball! In the Memory of the Forest was published in 1997, shortly after author Charles T. Powers died. This was his one and only novel, having spent his career as a journalist covering Eastern Europe for the LA Times. I remember reading this novel after it came out and thinking it was amazing, but it has been almost 25 years. Does the novel stand up? Yes, it does. In the Memory of the Forest is a story about Poland’s […]

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Cbr13bingo Cityscape, bingo #4 Row 1 The Pulitzer-Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, set during WWII, is the story of two teenagers who share an unusual connection. Marie-Laure Leblanc is blind and trying to survive the war in St. Malo, France. Werner Pfennig is an orphan with a genius for math and engineering in Zollverein, Germany. While they are on opposite sides of the war, they share a love of science, knowledge, and the world. Yet when we meet them, during the […]

An American Wine History

The Wild Vine by Todd Kliman

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Bingo 19: White Whale This book has possibly been on my shelf for 10 years; I can’t remember when I bought it, but it’s a hardback with a Borders sticker. And The Wild Vine was published in 2010, so I’m guessing it hadn’t been out too long when I picked it up. Either way, even if you go with when Borders went out of business, this book has been on my shelf a while. It’s framed as a journalist setting out to chronicle the not […]

TFW The Trenches of WWI Beat Life at Oxford, Any Day

Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves

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Bingo Square Shelfie Good-Bye to All That is rather a “Boy’s Own” version of, Robert Graves’ (the Irish-British poet) account of his public school and war years – WWI, that is.  Schooling started at Charterhouse School and continued at Oxford, and Graves did not enjoy any bit of it.  As soon as the War started, Graves signed up, as an officer, and never looked back.  War, it turned out, was far more his element. Graves was one of the several British poets involved in WWI, […]



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