Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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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.

 

530 pages and I wasn’t ready for it to be over

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Adrian’s stuff is so dense and layered, it’s hard to do a recap/overview. SO MUCH happens, and it’s all smart and dramatic and amazing! The world-building is so cool, the root-for-able characters and interesting plot are almost a bonus. Okay, enough gushing. The very very nutshell version: 40 years ago, ginormous alien ships (if you made a drinking game out of every time they’re described as ‘moon-sized,’ you’d be a puddle by the end) showed up and started making beautiful and deadly sculptures out of […]

trigger warning for hysterics

The World Record Book of Racist Stories by Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar

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What to do when you have a best selling book? Write a sequel, of course, and this time invite the whole family to join in! Amber and Lacey continue their two woman charm offensive on America, in a delightful book that will almost certainly be read by well-intentioned progressives to reassure themselves that they aren’t like racist racist. Just the normal amount of racism that’s fed to all of us through our participation in white supremacy via living in America as a product of the capitalist hamster […]

Even Better the 3rd Time Around

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

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What a difference time can make when re-reading books! The first time I read The Fellowship of the Ring, I was an undergrad and felt that about the first 100 pages was a slog. The second time (I don’t recall when that was), I was prepared for the slog and knew I’d enjoy the rest of the novel, minus what I felt was a rather pointless section with Tom Bombadil. But this time was different. It’s been several years since I last read it, and […]

“There is more history in a bowl of pasta than in the Colosseum”

Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal by Andreas Viestad

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I love Italian food (well, I am Italian).  I love history. I loved visiting Rome. Put that all together and you get Dinner in Rome – A history of the world in one meal by Andreas Vestad. This book was originally published in Vestad’s native language, Norwegian, but I am glad somebody thought it worthy of releasing in English in the US. The premise is very simple. Vestad sits down to a meal at his favorite restaurant in Rome. As he eats, he explores the […]

“They lead ‘still’ lives, waiting.”

Still Life by Louise Penny

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My husband and I started watching the Three Pines series on Amazon Prime, which was enjoyable; Chief Inspector Gamache, played by Alfred Molina, is a delight of eyebrows. The television series reminded me that I likely hadn’t read Ms. Penny’s earlier works though I have picked up the occasional book in an airport bookstore but have moved haphazardly through the series; thus, I decided to start at the first book. Sill Life draws Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec to the delightfully bucolic […]

The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

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Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s powerful, 1962 non-fiction book documenting the damage caused by widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides, has been on my TBR for a long time. I considered it something I simply had to read if I was going to continue to claim to be a science lover and environmentalist. I thought this would mostly be review for me since I’m already aware of the harm that DDT has caused. For one thing, I’m involved with an organization that supports conservation efforts around […]



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