Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Cats don’t really feature prominently in this narrative (Bingo)

Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart

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Nowhere Book Bingo: From the decade I was born (1970s) Smart Bitches Book Bingo: Published in 2000 or earlier (first published 1976) CBR16 Bingo: Vintage (published 48 years ago) Briony Ashley is working in Portugal when she recieves word that her father has died, in what appears to be a hit-and-run accident. Her father didn’t die instantly, but had time to ramble some strange and slightly mysterious things, among them a warning that Briony needs to be careful. She goes home to what is now […]

They sure did smoke all the time back in the day, didn’t they? (double bingo)

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart

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CBR14 Bingo: Question (the book’s title is a question and there is a central murder mystery where the identity of the murderer is in question) Young widow Charity Selborne is on holiday in the south of France with her friend Louise and they really have little planned except to enjoy the good food, nice drinks, beautiful scenery, and long drives. In Avignon, Charity befriends a young English boy who is also staying at the hotel, offering to take him with her on tours of the […]

Grab Bag

In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff

Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka

Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

The Collected Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece Pancake

Child of God by Cormac Mccarthy

Candide by Voltaire

A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman

On Animals by Susan Orlean

The Facts by Philip Roth

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In Pharoah’s Army -4/5 The second memoir by Tobias Wolff (known for A Boy’s Life too) but covering his time in Vietnam. This memoir reads a lot like a Vietnam novel — faint with memories, covering topics, and episodic. It’s hard not to compare it to Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried (a “novel”) and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship me Home (a memoir). In those two books Tim O’Brien likes to hide. There’s a few moments where […]

Wicked nuns and maybe-murders in a scenic setting

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Picture this: you get a letter from your cousin, who has run off to possibly join a convent in France. She asks you to visit her at the convent, and you have a slight hope that you can talk her out of it, so you hop on a train and dash off to France, running into your former crush on the way. You get to the (gorgeous, isolated, creepy) convent and a mean, aristocratic nun tells you your cousin died last week and is buried […]

The Last Enchantment (Arthurian Saga #3)

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I tried very hard to get into this book. It was so hard. I think that it ended up ending in a weird place and after going forward and reading “The Wicked Day” I really wish that Stewart had ended this book better to just stay away from continuing the Arthurian saga. There is really not much to say that I haven’t said in the other books. I like Merlin as a narrator, but everyone else is given very little development. The book starts to […]



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