Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Turned out that being with someone is an acquired skill. There is an art to it. Basically, you have to watch your partner take a chisel—or a war hammer, depending on the day—and chip away at the ideal version of them that you’ve created in your mind. The person you fall in love with is always slightly different from the person you need to stay in love with. More real and more flawed, but also more complex and better defined.”

The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed M. Masood

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This was a selection for my IRL book club that I’m pretty sure I never would have picked up on my own, but I’m glad I did. If nothing else, I’ve discovered that Syed Masood has a fantastic way with words. I don’t usually care about the actual writing in books very much; I prefer for it to fade into the background, but here he’s just so smart! And clever and funny. I wish I had liked the story he was telling more. This is […]

Not a book for me.

Memorial by Bryan Washington

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I really need to stop ordering the lit-fic option from Book of the Month. It so very rarely ends well. The premise here is that Mike and Benson are a couple. Mike is a chef and Benson is a daycare worker. Mike’s father is dying of cancer, and so he decides one day to go to Japan to mend their relationship, leaving Benson alone in their one bedroom apartment with his visiting mother, who only arrived that morning, also from Japan. Also, their relationship is […]

Before Lucy stepped into the wardrobe

Through the Wardrobe: How C. S. Lewis Created Narnia by Lina Maslo

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It is always funny, nice, or exciting (depending on your view) to learn the history behind a favorite book series. Or, even if you are not a fan, to learn about a popular reading series. And you get that in Through the Wardrobe: How C. S. Lewis Created Narnia by Lina Maslo. This picture book biography of C. S. Lewis hits the highlights of his life, disappointments, inspirations and his family/personal life and his writing process. There is also mention about his Christian upbringing, questing […]

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone can do anything.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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This was slower paced and less twisty-turny than her other books but I loved that about it. I liked her last book, The Witch Elm, but I loved this one. This is also a character study as well as a mystery/crime novel (that isn’t part of her Dublin Murder series), but here the protagonist is a former cop from Chicago who retired and decided to try and find peace in the Irish countryside. He bought a beaten down farmhouse and has spent a lot of […]

Red like the Blood that is all over the place

The Handmaid’s Tale: Graphic Novel by Renee Nault

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I admit, while I knew a smidgen of theme of The Handmaid’s Tale, I really did not know the “whole story.” The other thing was, I had (and still have) no interest in reading the over 300-page novel. And I really have no interest in watching the show based on it. Therefore, I figured I would just know about this modern classic and that was that. It was not until I saw that there was a graphic novel version that I figured, “Why not?” I […]

The last Jonathan Safran Foer book I will ever read. #CBRBingo – Nostalgia

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

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I picked this book up because a) I’ve owned it forever and pandemic reading has meant trying hard to find books off my own shelves. I’ve owned this for oh, about thirteen years? Back when I still thought I had to read books other people thought were “good” and “important.” And b) because of CBR Bingo, in which the Nostalgia square meant finding a book set during the time in which I was in high school. I had a surprisingly hard time finding books to […]



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