Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About ElCicco

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Married, mom of two, history PhD, feminist. I've been participating in Cannonball Read since CBR4. I love to read, and writing reviews keeps me from reading without thinking. I feel like I owe it to the authors who entertain me to savor their creations. It's like slowing down and enjoying a delicious meal instead of bolting your food.

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One Bad Day

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

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Cbr14bingo Scandal/bingo  Published in 1988 generated controversy for its violence, treatment of Barbara Gordon, Moore’s later criticism of his own. See this story in the Guardian. Batman: The Killing Joke, published in 1988, has had enormous influence on Batman movies and seems to be the generally accepted version of the Joker’s origin story. While I haven’t seen all of the Batman movies, as I read this graphic novel, I recognized that Hollywood has largely adopted Alan Moore’s story as canon. Moore himself in subsequent years […]

Putting the fun in dysfunctional

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

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Cbr14bingo Holiday/bingo Holidays on Ice is a collection of David Sedaris essays, some previously published and some new, all related to holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Halloween are all represented through autobiographical reflections as well as imaginative fictional stories. If you are unfamiliar with Sedaris, you should know that his writing is both hilarious and often shocking. He has a talent for making very inappropriate and unsettling statements but often in such a funny way that you laugh anyway. Like many people I became familiar […]

Good Cop/Bad Cat

The Eloquent Scribe: The Sitehuti and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet Series Book 1 by T. Lee Harris

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Cbr14bingo Font The main character is an Egyptian scribe turned investigator The Eloquent Scribe is the first book in a mystery series set in ancient Egypt and features a pair of unlikely investigators — Sitehuti the junior scribe and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet (aka Neffi), the sacred cat of the Temple of Bastet in capital city Pi-Ramesses. While the “mystery” in this novel is pretty straight forward and not terribly hard to solve for the reader, the charm of the story is in the characters and the potential […]

Of mice and soup

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

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Cbr14bingo Cozy “being the story of a mouse, a princess, some soup, and a spool of thread” This charming Newberry Award winning story is about a heroic little mouse and the princess he loves. It’s also about the pitfalls of being an outsider and the power of forgiveness. Despereaux’s family marks him as different and doomed from the moment he is born. Too small, with ears too big and born with his eyes open (an ill omen), everything about the little mouse disappoints his parents […]

It’s not what you are but what you do

The School for Good and Evil Book 1 by Soman Chainani

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Cbr14bingo Question (Bingo)— How did I not know I had this book? Why did it take me so long to finally read it? What do “good” and “evil” even mean? Looking over my bookshelves as I often do figuring out what to read next, this book, which I think has been there for years, recently stood out because I recognized it as the title of a movie coming out on Netflix in October. I have no idea how I came to be in possession of […]

All the good stuff that wasn’t in your history books

Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving by Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenberg

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Cbr14bingo Bodies – Bingo Mobituaries is a fascinating, eminently readable collection of humorist Mo Rocca’s obituaries for people and phenomena that didn’t get the attention they deserved at their passing. It’s the kind of book you can just pick up, open at random and immediately be drawn in. Certainly, some of the subjects of Mobituaries are people you have heard of (Audrey Hepburn, Herbert Hoover) but Mo Rocca will reveal things about them that might not have been featured in a traditional obituary or that […]



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