Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An Unexpected Reading Week

The Herd by Andrea Bartz

Cross to Bear by John Maginnis

Hiding In Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump by Sarah Kendzior

Quarry's List by Max Allan Collins

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This turned out to be an unexpected reading week for me as I knocked out four books between Monday and tonight. However, I worked a lot this week and was just too damn tired to log everything when I was finished so I’m dropping it all here. The Herd 3 stars I gave Andrea Bartz’s debut a weak 4-stars as I graded it on the new author curve. It was a fun New York tale but I feel like it could have been better. I was […]

Frozen Meets Fiddler on the Roof

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This was a highly entertaining mashup, drawing from several familiar sources, but with very much its own unique story to tell.  The fairy tale influences range from The Snow Queen to Rumpelstiltskin but with the addition of Tsarist Russia’s history with its Jewish population tossed in too.  But the core of the story has to do with three very different women who are each unwillingly matched up with a husband who is repulsive to them, and the means they each take to solve their dilemma. […]

An Engaging and Expansive Look at “A Paradoxical People”

Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East by Martin Sixsmith

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My wife and I recently watched the fantastic adaptation of War & Peace starring Lily James and Paul Dano (and Little Women’s James Norton, if you’ve seen it. That was my final straw – I had to learn more about Russian history. Everything I knew was from writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; as well as Doctor Zhivago and other movies. My usual search for history book advice on the internet wasn’t fruitful – any recommended book would be shot down by others as incorrectly biased or […]

A slow read in a slow week…

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

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This book was absolutely perfect for a post-Christmas rush day of doing literally nothing but reading. It’s based in Russia, spanning the 1920s-50s and takes place primarily inside a luxury hotel. The protagonist, Count Alexander Rostov, has been living there for some time, but after being tried by the state on the heels of the Bolshevik revolution (for writing some questionable poetry), he is sentenced to house arrest in that same hotel for the rest of his life. He is stripped of the suite befitting […]

One of my faves this year

Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

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I read Like War earlier this year by P.W. Singer which has the subtitle, the Weaponization of Social Media. I was at a conference for work and I was discussing the book with a colleague and she recommended Clint Watts to me.  She said that if I liked Singer, I’d love Watts.  Then one of her co-workers came up and raved about Watts and added that their organization works with him and that he was both brilliant and great. I added Messing with the Enemy […]

You will never find a Romanov conspiracy that I will not read.

The Lost Daughter by Gill Paul

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It wasn’t long after reading Gill Paul’s The Secret Wife, that I learned of her second Romanov conspiracy novel. As previously stated, I AM HERE FOR IT. I don’t care what the premise is, or how far-fetched, I will eat it right up. In this novel, Paul focuses the story on Maria (which, much like in The Secret Wife, it’s so fascinating to read a theory about someone other than Anastasia). Half of this novel focuses on Maria herself, starting just before the family massacre […]



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