Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Amerigo!? Heck no!

The Letters of America Vespucci and other documents illustrative of his career by Amerigo Vespucci

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Library Book Bingos exist for two reasons: 1. clearing my shelves of books that would have otherwise sat there and 2. challenging myself to learn new things. I don’t really like the second purpose. I prefer to read what I want to read and that is that. But this summer, all of my local libraries are doing Ocean themed bingos (boring!). One of them required a biography of a seafaring explorer. I knew little about Amerigo Vespucci, the man from which the word “America” likely […]

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

Violeta by Isabel Allende

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Violeta, who was born during the Spanish influenza pandemic and turns one hundred years old during the coronavirus pandemic, writes a memoir to hand down to her grandson Camilo. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Isabel Allende, and in fact have several others of her books on hand, piled in the tottering tower that is my TBR list. However, this is the first book by her that I’ve read, and it did not reach the heights I was expecting. Not that this is […]

I honestly would have enjoyed just reading about what it’s like to be an opera singer

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

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A group of international businesspeople, government leaders, and ambassadors gather together in the house of the vice president of an unspecified South American country to celebrate the birthday of one Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman. The vice president and the businesspeople of the South American country are trying to impress Mr. Hosokawa and convince him to set up factories and invest in their county. Mr. Hosokawa is only there because he will get to hear Roxanne Coss, world renowned opera soprano, sing. Mr. Hosokawa is […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]

You are entering the Red Zone. Proceed at own risk. When in doubt, run.

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I consider myself very lucky that I discovered Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” series only last summer, so the wait for City of Mirrors was much less painful and dramatic than it would have been if I’d been reading in real time: The Passage was published in 2010 and The Twelve in 2012. City of Mirrors came out four weeks ago. That’s not on a George R. R. Martin level, but still could have been a brutal wait for me. Whew! I love this series. I […]

Dragons with feathers!

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Though I’m writing reviews for Books 4-7 all at once, and posting separately, I haven’t mentioned until now that the regular cast of characters besides Temeraire and his human buddy Will Laurence has really grown to a large group of familiars. I have to give giant props to Naomi Novik for building a world of details easy to absorb and remember, and still read super quickly. This book, number 7 of the series, brings us to South America, one of the few continents not yet visited […]



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