Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The 3 Named Hippie Nun

Sister Corita's Words and Shapes by Jeanette Winter

Signs of Hope: The Revolutionary Art of Sister Corita Kent by Mara Rockliff

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Who was Sister Corita? To start with, she was a woman who would have three names by the end of her life, each representing that chapter her journey was in.  Born Frances Elizabeth Kent, she would enter the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart at age 18, becoming Sister Mary Corita Kent, then after over 30 years, she would leave them and become Corita Kent. She was a creative person that made her students think, see/look, and do it outside of the box. During a time […]

Nun of the Above

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy

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As readers, we all dream of books that are specifically written for us. Certainly, we sometimes like to be challenged and pulled out of our comfort zone. But most of the time, we sit around asking questions like: Man, I wish someone would write a book in the hardboiled vein of a badass Catholic nun trying to solve a mystery in sun soaked New Orleans. Or words to that effect. Anyway, yes, Margot Douiahy wrote a book that was basically fine tuned to someone who likes the […]

“For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.”

Matrix by Lauren Groff

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I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise. Here, it’s nuns. I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to […]

[got me] to a nunnery!

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Heloise & Abelard: A New Biography by James Burge

The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy's Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici by Elizabeth Lev

Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love by Myriam Cyr

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I thought I was going to need some time to recover from the exquisite The Everlasting, but really it flung me head-first into a literal rabbit-hole. A warren. An abbey. A nunnery, if you will. Also- The Atlantic just posted a list of books that were done dirty by pandemic releases, and OF COURE The Everlasting resides within those vaulted halls. I was immediately drawn to Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici after she was mentioned several times in The Everlasting. A distant relative of her spots her likeness in the […]

Nuns and Prostitutes

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block

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I knocked out two quick books in the last day, neither of which won me over. Mariette in Ecstasy Judging by other reviews of this book, it appears as if I’m taking a rare middle ground stance. I thought the prose was beautiful and the scene descriptions lush and full. I enjoyed several individual pages. But with a big cast of characters and a central one the writer makes intentionally mysterious, none of it resonates. Plotting is marginal at best. It just lurches from one […]

Alli Reviews “The Lonely Hearts Hotel”

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I think I might need to start making a list of where I heard about certain books, that way once they are finally available at the e-library I will know why I wanted to read them in the first place. This book overall was fairly good, but it was strange an a bit manipulative and I wonder who told me to read it. “The Lonely Hearts Hotel” is a book set in and around the Great Depression and follows the lives of two orphans in […]



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