Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

About tiny_bookbot

CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR18 Participant

I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

“And if I speak of Paradise”

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

by Leave a Comment

A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson’s fourth poetry collection, didn’t come across my radar until it won the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. While literary prize culture is as fallible as, say, film awards like the Oscars, the TSE Prize shortlist is always interesting to look at, and the title poem immediately caught my interest. Unfortunately, it was incredibly hard to get my hands on a copy! Robinson’s publisher, Peepal Tree Press, is a small independent press, and it seems like demand for the […]

“History is storytelling”

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

by Leave a Comment

This was a novel I had wanted to read when it was first published in 2016. Of course, that year was the year of a dissertation defense and a cross-country move and a new job, so by the time I had a chance to breathe, Homegoing had slipped down my list, supplanted by other novels. But then I received Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi’s sophomore novel, in a book subscription box, and I felt like maybe, just maybe, I ought to read her debut before tackling this new one. […]

If 28 Days Later and The Road had a daughter

The Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

by Leave a Comment

This was Round 2 of my ongoing “what’s going in in the world of Irish science fiction?” quest. (Round 1 was here.) First off: great title, no? I was instantly intrigued, especially with the description, and I liked this weird sense I was getting of the post-apocalypse as a site of feminist possibility rather than just endless misogyny and threatened sexual violence. (Sigh.) The premise is straightforward: Orpen lives with her mother and her mother’s partner, Maeve, on an isolated island off the coast of […]

Light on mischief, lacking mayhem entirely

A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem by Manda Collins

by 4 Comments

I have probably just been reading and watching too many murder mysteries (and listening to too much Shedunnit) to be won over to the charms of the first book in Manda Collins’s new series, named for its first book: A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem. The setup is pretty simple: in the earlyish (maybe mid) Victorian era, the widowed Lady Katherine Bascomb and her friend, Caroline Hardcastle, begin writing a column together for Kate’s newspaper; however, they foolishly dabble in crime reporting, and publish a […]

Crossdressing, murder, and blackmail, oh my!

The Body at the Tower (The Agency #2) by Y. S. Lee

by 1 Comment

(Note: mild spoilers for Book #1, A Spy in the House.) This has been a fun series to read in the evenings when winding down: the plotting is nicely propulsive, historical London is very well-centered, and Mary Quinn (née Lang) remains an engaging protagonist. This sophomore entry in Lee’s The Agency series picks up about a year after the first book left off: she is now a full member of the all-ladies investigatory firm concealed within Miss Scrimshaw’s School for Girls, and her two superiors […]

“It didn’t seem I could know it until I had lived it”

In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming

by Leave a Comment

This is the first novel I was nervous about teaching this semester. I knew Anand and Paton would go down pretty easy with my students, but this debut novel by George Lamming, originally published in 1953, is a shaggy dog of a book, with frequent stylistic shifts, and with its main character (only named as G, and loosely based on Lamming himself) often disappearing for multiple chapters at a stretch. Sometimes in this book, loving parents beat their kids, and friends fall out over dumb […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo