Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Keeping Hope in the Jungle

Sisters Under the Rising Sun by Heather Morris

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The passengers of the Vyner Brooke are pitched from the frying pan to the fire when the ship upon which they have been fleeing the Japanese invasion of Singapore is sunk off the shores of Indonesia. The women and children, musician Norah Chambers and nurse Nesta James among them, must survive in jungle camps until the end of the war. I am continuing my informal journey through the Pacific theatre of World War 2 with Sisters Under the Rising Sun, which chronicles the lives of a […]

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

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After graduating from college, Chris McCandless vanished from his former life and took to the road. The next that his family heard about him was several years later, when he was discovered to have starved to death in the remote Alaskan wilderness. I love Krakauer’s writing, astute and lyrical, and the way he tells this story makes me feel like I’m peering into the abyss of mortality he describes encountering on his ascent of Devils Thumb. Into Thin Air is one of my favorite books […]

The Past is a Different Country

Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age by Reid Mitenbuler

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Peter Freuchen first rose to prominence as an Arctic explorer in the early twentieth century, but during his long adventurous life he wore many other hats, becoming a best-selling author, working in Hollywood, and being imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp for being a member of the resistance. I like exploration stories. They introduce you to an old world that no longer exists, they have the kinds of details that boggle the mind, and are usually populated with exactly the eccentric kinds of people you’d […]

Fever Dream on the Northern Atlantic

The Last One by Will Dean

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Her trip on the luxury ocean liner RMS Atlantica is supposed to be the vacation of a lifetime, but when Caz wakes up to find that every other person on the ship seems to have vanished, it becomes a waking nightmare instead. It’s a good thing I went on my first cruise before I read this book. Partly because it makes it easier to visualize the setting, and partly I probably would have been more anxious about wandering around its deserted decks or corridors late […]

Rabbit go home

Watership Down: The Graphic Novel by James Sturm

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Watership Down: The Graphic Novel adapted by James Sturm and illustrated by Joe Sutphin took Richard Adams’ novel and made it into a lovely book about the power of the people, and lovely illustrations that show the good and the darkness around them. The story is the one you know and maybe loved as a child, but I was fresh to the story for the most part. I knew that there would be rabbits and people had said it was dark, but other than that, I had […]

Bronze-Age Crete

Minoan Wings V01 Dragonfly Song by Wendy Orr

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The novel Minoan Wings V01 Dragonfly Song is a contemporary toned story set in the Bronze Age. The historical facts were well researched by the author, Wendy Orr. And what is presented is not just the factual information, but also there is an arc about mythology and religion (such as the goddess worship vs the bull/masculine, the representation of the animals and nature), and one that feels like it has more modern ideas of equality and gender (the goddess, the mother,  the priestess, daughters). Though maternal ruled villages […]



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