Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fools for Love

Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham

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Mary Panton, a wealthy and beautiful widow who lives in an old villa in the hills overlooking Florence, is asked by a longtime friend to marry him. While he is away for a few days and she is considering his proposal, an encounter with a young refugee could destroy all her plans for the future. This is a short but intense novel that makes some poignant observations on the many facets of love, with Florence and the Tuscany region as a beautiful backdrop against which […]

Could I Offer You a Little Brian Blessed in These Trying Times?

The Panther In My Kitchen: My Wild Life With Animals by Brian Blessed

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  Like everyone else right now, I have been under a good deal of stress in the last few months, so I have been trying to take advantage of life’s small pleasures wherever I can. One of these has been trying to find the least stressful audiobooks to listen to. And for that, I really couldn’t go past The Panther In My Kitchen, due to it being written and narrated by Brian Blessed Sorry, that should read BRIAN BLESSED! As I noted in my review […]

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. But they’d still be charged. (CBR12Bingo2: I wish)

Point B by Drew Magary

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This is a really weird book for the “I Wish” square on its face, given that it involves a dead sister, an alcoholic best friend, a stalker, an even larger economic equality gap, and the ennui that comes from the hedonic treadmill rendering the magical prosaic. But you guys, it’s about teleportation! Can you imagine getting BORED of being able to instantaneously port to a tropical island? To hem and haw about having an outdated teleportation device, or having to pay a teleportation bill in […]

Atticus was almost home when the state trooper pulled him over.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Flygirl by Sherri L Smith

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I didn’t actually mean to put these books side by side in choosing to read them so close together. But they share a few similarities. Flygirl takes place in the 1940s and deals heavily with segregation and passing. And Lovecraft Country takes place in the 1950s and also deals heavily with segregation, as well as the Green travel guide, Jim Crows laws, and a…kind…of passing. But the weird thing both shared, in back to back days was that both, in dialog, used the word “panic […]

cbr12bingo – I Wish

Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

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I can’t read “I Wish” and not be immediately thrown into Into the Woods. I was tempted to start with “unrelated, but”…but it is related! It’s summertime, and PC Peter Grant has taken to the countryside, where all sorts of fairy-tale creatures are up to no good. “Anything can happen in the woods”, after all. Out of London and into the country! The National Trust is attempting to manage the wood, families are hiding secrets, a retired wizard lives in a tower full of bees, […]

One of the best books I’ll read this year

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

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#CBR12 Bingo: I Wish (Travelling anywhere right now seems like an utter impossibility, but I would love to be able to hang out on Marsyas Island with its cast of unique residents) Linus Baker does not live an exciting or interesting life. When he’s not visiting orphanages and checking up on children and teens with unusual abilities or magical powers, he sits in his utterly anonymous cubicle and writes detailed and thorough reports. He goes home to his non-descript little house, occasionally exchanges words with his […]



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