Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“For I was indeed a student of human nature, as every orphan and hooker and unwanted kid must be.”

Vera by Carol Edgarian

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CBR 17 Bingo: Family – Central to Vera’s story is a desire for a family in which she can truly belong, and her outside status with both her birth mother and her foster family. Vera has always lived under the shadow of a great secret – though raised as the younger daughter in a Swedish household, she is actually the daughter of San Francisco’s greatest madams. In the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1906, these worlds come tumbling together. I remember it was a […]

Joe Buck LOVES Christina Applegate

Lucky Bastard: My Life, My Dad, and the Things I'm Not Allowed to Say on TV by Joe Buck

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A lot of people on the internet hate Joe Buck. I’m not one of those people.  Because I grew up in Texas, I am a big Troy Aikman fan.  I like Joe Buck by association. Plus, unless a sports broadcaster never stops talking, I usually have a favorable opinion of them. Ergo, I picked up this audiobook. I was looking for a light, fun listen for my work drives. Lucky Bastard delivered. Joe Buck was born in 1969 to beloved St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck […]

One of my most anticipated books of the year is a complete flop. CBRBINGO – ‘B’

Behooved by M. Stevenson

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. This was SO DISAPPOINTING. I CANNOT CAPSLOCK THIS ENOUGH. I suppose it’s my own fault. A great, enticing premise does not a good book make. Okay, actually, the author has some share of this, also. She wrote the thing. But your own expectations are never a good thing to put on a book, regardless of the book’s quality. Still, I went and did that. HOWEVER. Even without […]

Read this book to find out what “uh” is a euphemism for! CBRBINGO – Red

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. The dark fairytale vibes of this were just what I needed yesterday when I flew through this audiobook. Especially since the audiobook I had been listening to previously is the epitome of a three-star read. Such a genuine pleasure to read a T. Kingfisher book after that, rich in atmosphere, fun dialogue, and characters that are easy to like and follow. Plus, her fairytale retellings (of which […]

No One Else Can Come in and Copy You

Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology by Jorge Goldstein

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Ok, keeping with the gene-theme this summer, I’ll now be briefly turning my attention to gene patents. Jorge Goldstein’s Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology is a great introduction to biological patents in the US (and beyond). It’s also a rather personal narrative; Goldstein entered the field of patent law at a time when biotechnology was experiencing some rapid advances (many of them mentioned in the previous book I reviewed), and he describes his career as like […]

Kin in Far-flung Places

A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao

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CBR17 Bingo: Diaspora – This story is intimately bound up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in colonial Fiji, who went to work there as indentured servants but were in reality little more than slaves. Caught between demotion and disgrace, Indian police officer Akal Singh is instead posted to colonial Fiji, where an investigation into the vanishing of an indentured Indian woman from a sugarcane plantation is complicated by the political pressures within the British Empire. I’m a sucker for an unusual setting in […]



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