Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

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.

 

Smut at its finest: Lights Out

Lights Out by Navessa Allen

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Lights Out was smut at its finest. A trauma ER nurse crushes on a sexy masked man via social media. She dares him to dirty things to her, never expecting anything. It was fantasy to blow off steam after work…until things get very, very real. MILD SPOILERS  Josh (the masked man) comes across Aly’s (the nurse) spicy comment and realizes he might know her IRL. It starts with some mild stalking, but ramps up over the course of the story. Josh is a shut-in and […]

The Best and Worst Books of CBR17

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What’s the best book you read this year? Are you still looking for that 5 star read to top off your shelf? Or do you need to know what book to put back on the shelf? Well, your fellow Cannonballers are here to help you out. We’ve got the Best and Worst reads of the year ready for you. (These are books published in any year but were read in 2025.) Take a look over at Pajiba, and find out what books you can pick […]

Registration for CBR18 is Open

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Cannonball Read is an annual, memorial book challenge to read and review 52 books in a year. Or 26. Or 13. Choose your level and read to meet your goal all while fundraising for the American Cancer Society in the memory of AlabamaPink. Find out how you can support the Cannonball Read mission today.  

In which I write 1,200 words about non-book things

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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There is a long history of “public intellectuals” in America. Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton all the way down to Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag. When I was a younger man, I became fascinated with the idea of a public intelligentsia. Not any specific person, but the idea of knowledgeable, erudite experts who wrote and spoke for public, rather than academic, consumption. When YouTube became a thing and old clips that had previously been difficult to find became readily available to anyone with an interest, […]

“If a book is well-written, I always find it too short”

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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4.5 stars CBR17 Bingo: Black (a book with a black cover) I had completely forgotten that I read and reviewed this book back in 2016. My original review can be found here. My plot summary of the more than 200-year-old novel can be found in my previous review. Nevertheless, my reading experience this time around was different enough from earlier times that I wanted to write about some of my thoughts and observations, not to mention some of the points of discussion that came up during my […]

Fascinating Exploration of Language

Wordslut by Amanda Montell

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Best for: Those interested in learning more about how our language is shaped by – and shapes – society. Everyone who speaks US English. In a nutshell: Author Montell explores a variety of aspects of language and how it reinforces and can be used to fight the patriarchy. Worth quoting: N/A (but only because it was an audio book and usually I was running while listening so didn’t have a way to note something down) Why I chose it: The topic was intriguing to me. […]



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