Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Locked island mystery

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

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Another Agatha Christie! Clearly I like a detective novel and given the stress of pandemic wedding planning and the ‘spooky’ month of October, another Agatha Christie just felt right. And Then There Were None is Christie’s 1939 book, previously published as Ten Little Indians and before that by another even more offensive title. The name of the book comes from children’s nursery rhyme that forms the basis for the multiple murders in the book. Set on an island off the south coast of England, the […]

Some Audible Originals

Sweet Talk by Cara Bastone

What the Hex by Alexis Daria

The Magic Flower Shop by Gina Mayer

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Sweet Talk By Cara Bastone   This story was absolutely adorable and I loved it!     The main premise is that Elliot sends a voice message text at 2 a.m. to a wrong number.  JD (not her real name, but what she’s referred to for most of the story) is already awake to receive said voice text.  She responds, and they go back and forth before Elliot realizes that he hasn’t been talking to his sister.  JD knows who Elliot is immediately – she had […]

Things are not always what they seem (Double Bingo)

The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Landscape Costis is one of the Attolian guards, fiercely loyal to his beloved (if fearsome) queen and skeptical and disdainful of his so-called king, the former Thief of Eddis, who through trickery and guile ended up married to their queen. Nevertheless, when he foolishly loses his temper and ends up striking the king in the face, he’s mortified and expects to be sent home in disgrace if he’s lucky, executed if he’s unlucky. Yet the strange, new young king surprises everyone, […]

“If all goes well, human history is just beginning.”

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

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“The Anthropocene is the time of profound human effects on the environment, while the Precipice is the time where humanity is at high risk of destroying itself.” There are quite a few different scenarios that could lead to the extinction of humans in the next 100 years, but some of them are negligible, like an asteroid or comet hitting the Earth, or a stellar explosion. Others, like climate change, nuclear weapons, or unaligned artificial intelligence, on the other hand, seem more likely. In this book, […]

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 […]

“The wind blows itself out, and dawn comes to the window cold and still in a clear gold-green.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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I waited to pick up a Tana French novel even though she is highly regarded around these parts. Late last year I commented on narfna’s review that I was hesitant to pick up another author who writes an ongoing series (I’ve got the Inspector Gamache books to contend with) and that’s true enough. But I think another component was that I knew French wrote gritty, hard-boiled crime novels and I just wasn’t in the mood for those, no matter the quality of the writing (the […]



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