Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Toxic Wellness

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley

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Opening weekend at an ultra luxurious wellness focused manor resort on the seaside? Sounds great, sign me right up, I’m sure nothing terrible will happen. Francesca has been focusing her considerable powers on transforming her late grandfather’s seaside estate into the hottest new wellness destination for the wealthy instagram set. She’s being helped by her husband Owen, a world famous and highly in demand architect. Young Eddie just wants to work his way up to being a bartender while hiding the fact that he comes […]

Liar Liar Pants Incredibly on Fire

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

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This was very much a case of right book, right time. I needed something fast-paced and twisty that would absorb me fully and let me focus on the characters’ trials and tribulations.  And this book delivered exactly what I needed!   The book follows Evie Porter, except that is not her real name.  And the whole history she has spun for her boyfriend Ryan is not true.  Evie and Ryan’s completely coincidental meeting was also anything but coincidental.   But Evie is not scamming Ryan becasue […]

“They pick volatile people, people who’re going to perform for the cameras, they wind them up as tight as they can, they engineer a bunch of high-stress situations that are practically guaranteed to make someone lose their shit, throw in some alcohol—and then they sit back and let the cameras roll and the tweets pour in.”

One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware

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If you’re looking for another summer read to lazily sink your reading teeth into, Ruth Ware is usually a pretty good choise, and this one is no different. With a beachy setting, lots of intrigue and vapid people it’s a recipe for grand escapism. For anyone who is a mindful consumer of reality TV (i.e. you know it’s fake but you love it anyway) this is a fun peak behind the fictional curtain of a British show set on a tropical island meant to showcase […]

C I Yikes

Libra by Don DeLillo

Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer

The Ghost by Robert Harris

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Recently, I read three different books featuring CIA chicanery (two were fictional). This was unintentional but I figured since the themes were similar, I’d just batch review them rather than do individual ones. Libra***** This was a re-read. I liked it the first time. I loved it now that I: a. had a better since of the Oswald timeline after reading Posner’s Case Closed and b. could appreciate the meta-narrative structure in a way I couldn’t before. This is the only DeLillo book I can really […]

‘Aint no chocolates here

Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill

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“Buy my step-father’s ghost.” You’d think this was a novel idea, but it is something you can find on ebay today. I was going to link something here but got the heebie jeebies just searching for haunted items and don’t need the bad vibes right now. Although I have to wonder, does it increase the value of an item to describe it as haunted? In either case, buyer beware! Heart Shaped Box is Hill’s first full-length novel, published in 2007 (he also published a collection […]

The Bad Knights

The Lost Order by Steve Berry

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: golden. The book centers around a fictionalized version of the Knights of the Golden Circle and the book has a quest for gold.  First of all, I had no idea that a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle actually existed. Formed in 1852, they had a goal of expanding a slavery empire through the southwest United States, into Mexico and central America, and including the Caribbean. All of this happened before the Civil War and they […]



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