Cannonball Read 10

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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ElCicco

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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ElCicco's Reviews:

Not just another WWI novel

Regeneration by Pat Barker

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#cbr10bingo And So It Begins Pat Barker’s Booker-nominated first volume of the Regeneration Trilogy takes place during World War I and, unsurprisingly, deals with the trauma and horror of that conflict. What sets her work apart from other WWI novels, however, is that the action takes place not at the front but at an asylum for British soldiers suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Many of the characters in Regeneration are real people who really knew each other in London and at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh: the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves; the doctors Rivers, […]

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9/18/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:38 |

“Good old blackmail! You just can’t beat it.”

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

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#cbr10bingo #ThrowbackThursday FYI if you are looking to fill in a #Birthday square on your card, Wodehouse’s birthdate is 10/15 (same as mine!) Back in my junior high/high school days, my sister worked at a bookstore and among the treasures she brought home were P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. I could not get enough of them, and I thoroughly enjoyed the British TV series from the 1990s starring Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves.  Even now when I reread these gems, I hear their voices as the main characters — Bertie, the wealthy and somewhat […]

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9/8/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:37 |

Pass the harpoon ‘cuz this one blows

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

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#cbr10bingo #whitewhale I purchased this book five years ago and began to read it for one of the Cannonballs but stopped after about 20 or 30 pages. I had not seen the award-winning film (still haven’t) but I knew it was about patients in a psych ward and a sadistic nurse. I stopped reading because I knew, just based on the first few pages, that actions would be described that I did not want to read, so I put it aside and decided to come back to it some day. It’s been surfacing in my stack periodically ever since then. […]

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9/1/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:36 |

A parable of Nigeria

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

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#CBR10bingo #Backlog — published in 2015, this has been in my stack for three years! The Fishermen, Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, was nominated for a Man Booker prize. His second novel is due early next year. Set in the town Akure, Nigeria in the mid-1990s, The Fishermen is the story of four brothers whose lives are upended in a tragically short period of time. This novel has the feel of a parable, or of a very grim fairy tale. It has a dark psychological component that reminded me a little of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Key characters exhibit […]

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8/26/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:35 |

Underrepresented #CBR10 Bingo

The Descent of Monsters by JY Yang

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JY Yang is a queer, non-binary, post-colonial intersectional feminist. They live in Singapore. The Descent of Monsters is the third in JY Yang’s Tensorate Series. I reviewed the first two volumes earlier this year, and the third continues the riveting and ingenious story of a world where a very privileged few hold ultimate power and wield it with disregard, if not contempt, for the rest. While the first two volumes focus on the extraordinarily talented twin children of the supreme dictator known as the Protector, this third volume is told from the point of view of a lesser tensor, Sariman, […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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8/14/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:34 |

Oh, the humanity!

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

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#CBR10Bingo Cannonballer Says This book was a gift from cannonballer Malin in the 2017 book exchange and was also recently recommended by Lowercasesee in Quick Questions with a Cannonballer.  For my first review of CBR10, I read Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather and loved it for its wit, humor and wisdom. Malin had sent the book as part of the CBR9 book exchange, and she included Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens in the package. Let me just say this: I am a fan of Pratchett for sure and most likely will become one of Gaiman’s, too. Good Omens deals with the […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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8/6/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:33 |

A Summer Bromance

Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery by Andrew Shaffer

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I knew I was going to have to read this book when I saw the cover. I didn’t even know what it was about, but I knew I needed this. As it turns out, Hope Never Dies is a pretty good mystery featuring Joe Biden and Barack Obama as a crime solving duo. Uncle Joe narrates the story of his friend Finn’s suspicious death on an Amtrak line in Wilmington, Delaware. Writer Andrew Shaffer, in this his first mystery, unravels a tale of railway life, drugs, gangs, and, as a delightful side note, of friendship. When the story opens, Joe […]

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Purchase Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery by Andrew Shaffer or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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7/18/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:32 |

“Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.“

There There by Tommy Orange

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There There is an innovative and engrossing first novel from Native American writer Tommy Orange. Through his multiple character narration, he explores the question of what it means to be an “urban Indian” in the US. The title There There comes from a Gertrude Stein quote that is often taken out of context and misunderstood, much like Native Americans. In referring to Oakland, California, where Stein grew up and where the action of There There takes place, Stein wrote that there was no there there anymore, meaning that the Oakland she knew as a child had changed so much that […]

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Purchase There There by Tommy Orange or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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7/13/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:31 |


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