Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

Siskel & Ebert Get the Biography Treatment

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever by Matt Singer

by 2 Comments

The core of Opposable Thumbs is the relationship between Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and how it turned into the entity “Siskel & Ebert” that still dominates the movie review and criticism landscape more than a decade after the death of its last surviving member. It is the nature of that professional relationship, born from a natural wellspring of competition, which turned into decades of increased media literacy. It began in earnest in 1975, when the two men met for lunch in a Chicago pub […]

Are You Happy In This Modern World?

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price

by 1 Comment

A double-header! I read these back-to-back and, while that was super fun for me, I would recommend picking one or the other. The Shallows is a sharply-observed exploration of what the internet is doing to our brains and how that is affecting… everything. First published in 2010, author Nicholas Carr was responding to rapidly shrinking computers and laptops and how the ability to access the internet from anywhere was altering our minds and society. Smart phones were not yet ubiquitous (the first iPhone was released […]

Fantasy is Social Commentary and I Love It

Witch King by Martha Wells

by 3 Comments

CBR15Bingo — Relation “ship” — This is a very relationship focused book and they spend time on two different ships as well. My first Martha Wells! And a nice way to start, as I fully enjoyed this book and am glad I went ahead and bought it at full price after dithering over it at the bookstore two days in a row. I got the B&N signed edition, which is a sturdy hardcover with her signature embossed in gold on the inside cover. I thought […]

Gini Koch encouraged me to join the team and ‘touch an alien’, so I did!

Touched by an Alien by Gini Koch

by 3 Comments

CBR Bingo: North America – Touched by an Alien is set in the American Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico. A few years ago I picked up Alexander Outland: Space Pirate by G.J. Koch and it was a blast.  Funny, fast paced, sci-fi adventure.  Afterwards, I looked for more books by the author and discovered she also wrote under Gini Koch and was impressed by the volume of books on the shelf at the bookstore.  As I didn’t know where to start, I got overwhelmed and went […]

Hypothesis: The first book will never be as good as subsequent books from an author if you read them out of order

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

by 16 Comments

I wrote a glowing review of Ali Hazelwood’s newest book a few weeks ago. I liked it so much I picked up the first book the author wrote-  The Love Hypothesis. The Love Hypothesis has many of the aspects I liked about the author – a deep and thorough knowledge of working in STEM and strong female characters with great personalities and interests, as well as interesting male leads and supporting characters. But that’s where many of the similarities end. What I liked about Loathe […]

A thriller about grief that only made me cry a little bit

The Guide by Peter Heller

by 2 Comments

Peter Heller writes such introspective thrillers. I am not a fisher, and I know very little about the technical terminology related to outdoors activities like hunting, or fishing, or riding horses. At times, it was almost like reading words from another language, and I used context clues to determine that word must refer to a shoe, or that must be another word for a fishing rod. Despite the language barrier, I found myself captivated by this meditation on grief, guilt, mixed with an anti-capitalist thriller […]



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