Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Spain and Not Plain

The Queen of the South by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

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I’ve been slumping lately due to stress at work and have mostly been hewing to light fiction (see Daisy Darker). I didn’t expect to connect with Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s literary crime novel when cycling through what I wanted to read next but the writing hooked me from page one and away we went. This is an interesting book. It’s good, very good. I’m not sure it’s great but I don’t want to dwell on that. I’ll focus on what I liked: it’s absolutely a retelling in some […]

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 […]

Total Football

The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making -- and Unmaking -- Of the World's Greatest Soccer Club by Simon Kuper

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Travel. I’d love to go to Barcelona some day.  My first real exposure to FC Barcelona was the 2009 Champions League Final. At the type, I wasn’t seriously following European soccer. The hype of this match reached my ears. Man U was on its last legs as the nonpareil of England, Cristiano Ronaldo was just entering his prime. Meanwhile, Barca was emerging as the sport’s dominant force with stars such as Girard Pique, Andres Iniesta and the rising Lionel Messi. […]

My high hopes for horror were halted

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

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I read another one of Enriquez’s collections of short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, earlier this year. I loved that collection so much. In my review, I called it the ‘most effective collection of short stories I [had] ever read’ and a ‘knockout’. I figured that Things We Lost in the Fire would be similar. Unfortunately that is not the case. In Things We Lost in the Fire, we have the same elements in each short story present in the collection of short stories in The Dangers […]

The most effective collection of short stories I have ever read

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a collection of short stories by Mariana Enriquez. The stories are a mix of magical realism and outright horror. An Argentine writer, many stories take place in Argentina but a fair few also take place in Barcelona, Spain. Enriquez embues each story with a richness of their environment that make each story feel real and possible, despite the more horrific, fantastical elements. Most collections of shorts stories that I have read in my life are mostly fine. They […]

If you don’t understand women, don’t make one your main character.

Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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Labyrinth of the Spirits is the fourth and final novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It’s a fitting end to an enjoyable series, and does an admirable job of gathering up all the loose threads of the three previous books. Like The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven, Labyrinth of the Spirits tells a magical mystery story of the dark days of Franco’s Fascist Spain. It does not disappoint in the telling of the story, and I was (mostly) engrossed […]



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