Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

More Cookbooks I’ve Been Perusing

Nadiya’s Kitchen: Over 100 Simple, Delicious Family Recipes by Nadiya Hussain

Easy Gourmet: Awesome Recipes Anyone Can Cook by Stephanie Le

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I’m grouping these two together because they both fulfill the Reading Women Challenge task 4: Cookbook by a woman of color. I own one and borrowed the other, I’ve cooked from both (although no pictures this time – sorry!) and I feel each is a three star book for me, for similar reasons. Without further ado… Nadiya’s Kitchen After having fallen in love with Nadiya and her outstanding bakes on the Great British Bake Off (Great British Baking Show in the U.S.) and placing her […]

Lau writes characters you care about – and that’s a really good thing.

A Fake Girlfriend for Chinese New Year (Holidays with the Wongs #3) by Jackie Lau

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I continue to love the conceit of these novellas; there are four Wong children, all unattached, and their parents and grandparents hatch a plan to set them up with potential partners at Canadian Thanksgiving based on the tropes in the romance novels that their mother and grandmother read. The initial matches go terribly, but as the holidays progress each Wong sibling finds love in different romantic tropey ways. For A Fake Girlfriend for Chinese New Year Lau combined the friends to lovers and fake relationship […]

“She had a lifelong habit of extending care to animals too wild or frightened to accept it- which made her the bravest kind of fool.”

The Wallflower Wager (Girl Meets Duke #3) by Tessa Dare

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This was not the book I was going to read next, but after the bummer of Royal Holiday I knew I needed a sure thing and a Tessa Dare book will always be a book that I quite enjoy. I pulled up the one I’d been saving, book three in the Girl Meets Duke series, and spent the afternoon and evening absorbed in Dare’s kooky version of Regency England. I love a fun, feminist, anachronistic romance novel and that is something that Tessa Dare delivers […]

“I hate to be sanctimonious about it, but it turns out that good conversation solves a great many problems.”

That Inevitable Victorian Thing by E.K. Johnston

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I don’t read all that much alternative history, so it took a bit of digging through my to read list in order to find something to read for Read Harder’s Task 2. But, sure enough I had one and while I let it sit to very late (although not the latest on my to read list for this year’s challenges) it was an enjoyable, if slightly unexpected, read. For plot summary purposes I’m going to borrow from Goodreads, since I’m not sure I could do […]

“And if you trace a flawed narrative about Appalachia back far enough, you’ll often find someone making a profit.”

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

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I definitely only picked this up because it was a recommended selection for Read Women challenge task 4 – read a book about or set in Appalachia. I was hoping to find something fictional, but here we are. Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is written as a rebuttal to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a book I have not read and have no intention of reading. Watching from the cheap seats I’ve seen Elegy get pulled apart as Vance’s inconsistencies and frankly […]

Why Shouldn’t Quiet Be Strong? (CBR11 Bingo)

Quiet Girl in a Noisy World: An Introvert’s Story by Debbie Tung

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I love a list, LOVE them. When Bingo is unveiled I happily settle in and draft up what books I want to read for what squares, cross-referencing them with my other reading challenges to see which books might cross-pollinate, and finally devise a schedule to try to get a Blackout by the time Bingo wraps up. It worked perfectly last year as I snuck in just under the wire with my 25th review. This year its been a slightly more bumpy road, two months in […]



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