Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

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Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A Bookish Memoir/biography CBR17 Pie Chart: Education CBR17 Bingo: Citizen (Nafisi lived and taught in Iran during increasingly more dictatorial strictures against its citizens) Official summary: Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic […]

Life of a Wife Guy

A Wilder Shore by Camille Peri

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Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde among many other works, was born in Scotland in 1850 and died in Samoa in 1894. In those forty-four years, he packed in a lot of travel alongside all that writing. Much of the travel was for health reasons: at the urging of doctors he was constantly looking for more temperate climates to ease his frequent attacks and hemorrhages. Confined to his nursery as chronically ill […]

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

“Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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CBR17 Bingo: Review – I first came across Caitlin Doughty and her books through numerous reviewers on Goodreads. Caitlin Doughty had been long fascinated with death, but when she started working at a crematory, she soon found herself more interested in the question of why death in America has become so distant from the general public. I am maybe not the right audience for Doughty’s message about the loss of intimacy and ritual in the American way of death. I am a Hindu, and we […]

“A poem was pinned under Hoshiar’s picture of young Duleep: “I have been thrown into a far-flung place, had everything, all that I once cherished, my Kingdoms and my very life taken from me. I am now in a foreign place, so far from my people. So far from my homeland.”

The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence by Anita Anand

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A Indian freedom fighter waited more than two decades to exact revenge for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre which was ordered by the British Raj – but the story is more complicated and less cinematic than it has been often depicted since. At the start of this book, the author notes that as the descendent of Indians, she had to set aside her natural aversion to the British Raj and admiration for Udham Singh to tell the story in as unbiased a way as she could. […]

“The AUDACITY of society to infuse ‘manhood’ into a child’s life.”

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

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I read this “memoir-manifesto” during Banned Books Week, and at one point while I was looking up something about it, I saw that a school board member had filed a complaint with the sheriff’s office after finding this book in a few school libraries. Yes – she basically called the cops on a book. And an important book, at that. It was a stark reminder of why it’s so important to read banned books, not just during one week in October, but year round. And […]



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