Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search

About faintingviolet

CBR 4
CBR 5
CBR 6
CBR 7
CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR18 Participant

A reader and caffeine addict who consumes all sorts of books, some just more frequently than others. Your CBR Book Club Maven with over a decade of Cannonballing experience I believe in the beauty that comes from a common goal of reading, reviewing, and discussing. Also, Fuck Cancer. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: faintingviolet's Quick Questions interview.)

faintingviolet's Reviews:

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

by Leave a Comment

In 2015 I read Ward’s Men We Reaped and I was fascinated with the way Ward’s language in a memoir was tinged with a bit of magical realism, and also just a larger than life feeling. At the time I put Ward on my radar – this was an author I was interested in a further relationship with. Once reviews for her 2017 work Sing, Unburied, Sing started coming in I knew this would be the one. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a big, award-winning book […]

Final Bingo Post – Bingos 9 and 10 with Karina Longworth

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood by Karina Longworth

by 2 Comments

I’ve been a fan of Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This since 2015, and when Longworth announced she was writing a book about the Howard Hughes era of Hollywood focusing on the women who came into contact with him and telling their stories I was intrigued. After listening last year to the season “The Seduced” which served as an extended trailer for this book as well as a place for information that didn’t fit into the book (which at over 500 pages certainly has […]

“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (Bingo!)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

by Leave a Comment

This is my first O’Connor, which seems strange as a Catholic raised in the American South (maybe if I had gone to a catholic school?) and it is both fascinating and darkly comic, which I don’t know that I was ready for. O’Connor is asking the reader what does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be moral? Those questions are the heart of A Good Man is Hard to Find, and then doubled down by making it the title piece of […]

Bingo #3 With a Banned Short Story

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

by Leave a Comment

In a bit of bingo logistics, I decided a couple short stories might be in order to fill in as many remaining squares as I could. With that in mind I went down the list of things I’ve been meaning to read anyway and came across “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson which has quite the history of making people question its place in front of readers at all. What I didn’t know was just how short it really is – its only 3,773 words long! […]

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” (CBR11 Bingo)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Rosamund Pike (narrator)

by 1 Comment

I have absolutely no idea how to review this book. Instead, I’ll tell you the story of my relationship with it. In my sophomore year of high school we read Austen for the first time. I clearly remember our teacher (looking back he was young, with long hair) stalking around the room selling us on an author only some of us had heard of, and attempting to inspire in us the mental fortitude it takes a 15 or 16 year old to really battle with […]

“I see poisoners—so calculating, so cold-blooded—as most like the villains of our horror stories.” (CBR11 Bingo)

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

by Leave a Comment

I don’t know what it says about me that I quite enjoy medical history and historic New York, but I do know that it says that The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York is right up my alley. It also wins the prize for longest title of the books I’ve read this year. Blum’s book tracks the time when a pair of forensic scientists, Charles Norris and Alexander Getler began the chemical detective work that forensic science […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo