Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Extra Reading March 2022

Batman: The Killing Joke by Christa Faust and Gary Phillips

The Big East: Inside the Most Entertaining and Influential Conference in College Basketball History by Dana O'Neil

In The Country We Love: My Family Divided by Diane Guerrero

The Banks by Roxane Gay, Ming Doyle (Illustrator)

One Night, New York by Lara Thompson

The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elissa Wald

Lost and Found in Harlem by Delia C. Pitts

Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Scandal in Babylon by Barbara Hambly

Sadie by Courtney Summers

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These are the books I finished in the month of March in which I didn’t have time or words to elaborate on… Batman: The Killing Joke *** Two of my favorites team up for a Batman prose novel? Yes! But the end result is just okay. Interestingly enough, I think both writers do a better job with the random Gothamites than they do with the Caped Crusader and his primary nemesis. You’re fine just reading Alan Moore’s legendary graphic novel. The Big East: Inside the […]

“As for order, it is my express wish to live as ordered a life as possible. But the world is filled with random chaos that often devils my attempts at arrangement.”

The Maid by Nita Prose

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I was really worried I wouldn’t like this, and I so wanted to like this. I heard the premise (maid finds dead body in hotel room, becomes suspect, decides to solve crime), pointed my finger, and loudly ejaculated, “THAT BOOK IS FOR ME.” Sorry I used ‘ejaculated,’ I just never have before (I don’t think?) and it was calling to me. I’ve been reading too much historical fiction set in 19th century England lately. People were always ejaculating back then*. *I could not type this with […]

“But there are many fools in the world. One praises God for their existence and keeps out of their way.”

The Man in the Brown Suit (Colonel Race, #1) by Agatha Christie

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This was a fun outlier in Christie’s body of work, though it is actually one of her earliest published books. She doesn’t normally do thrillers or espionage (and when she does it’s often not all that great), or feature one-off main characters, or feature a narrative that has travel and adventure in it, but this book has all of that. It’s also unfortunately one of the more dated of Christie’s works because it takes place outside that domestic sphere her other work is so comfortable […]

The Book I Needed Right Now

The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran

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I really needed this book right now. I tried for almost a decade to get into the Claire DeWitt series. I thought the idea of a transgressive detective traipsing around the country solving crimes while spitting wry dialogue would be fun. But I felt like Sara Gran laced her books with too many acerbic observations and dead end philosophies; which inevitably messed with the flow of the book. But as Stevie Nicks would say: Time makes bolder children grow older. My 20s became my 30s. Stuff happened. […]

Surprisingly Enjoyable

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead

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For as often as I read mystery thrillers like this, I so rarely enjoy them. And there are so many reasons I shouldn’t have enjoyed In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, but I still did, in spite of all of them. The main character, Jess, is an overachiever preparing to go back to her 10 year college reunion at Duquette, a college which is “just a step below the Ivy League.” In college she was part of a golden group called the East House Seven […]

Connection is Made

The Verifiers by Jane Pek

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In an ideal world, this would be the first of a 10-book series. There’s certainly room here for at least one sequel and more. Which doesn’t mean Jane Pek needs to do this. Series eventually run out of steam as one can only recycle the same characters and plots for so long. But I really loved this writer’s style, her protagonist, and the way she uses New York City. But it’s not just that this was written by a city-dwelling millennial who loves mysteries (as Jane Pek […]



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