Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Who is by your side? And who are you by?

Berrybrook Middle School V05 Enemies by Svetlana Chmakova

by Leave a Comment

The Berrybrook Middle School series is a fun series. The cast Svetlana Chmakova created is diverse and deals with classic middle school subjects (such as growing up, boyfriend/girlfriends, best friends, lost friendships, and more) with modern twists. It is realistic, but in goofy way to help keep the serious subjects from going to “deep. These graphic novels are great for the preteen to young teen (10 to 14 the best ages) reading audience. This time in Enemies (the fifth book) we have Felicity and her […]

Wayfarer’s Series #3 and 4

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

by 3 Comments

Stars, this series was so good. Record of a Spaceborn Few is my favorite book of the series, although I did love them all. I cannot recommend them highly enough – but this third book was my favorite. The Wayfarer’s series presents the most humane version of a Universe in which humans have finally shuffled off their earthly coils and set sail for the Great Beyond. In books 1 and 2, the reasons for doing so are hinted at (climate crises, war, etc) and there is […]

A Great First (Long) Book in a (Long) Series

City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams

by Leave a Comment

After carrying this book around from apartment to apartment for thirteen years, I finally made it beyond the first hundred pages and have finished the first book in the quartet. At this pace, I should be done in about 39 more years, so there’s hope! I think this really is a case of a book needing to be read at the right time. With a long train commute and a sudden urge to read Tad Williams, the stars aligned. City of Golden Shadow is set in […]

The Four Feathers

The Four Feathers by AEW Mason

by Leave a Comment

This 1902 novel about British soldiers in foreign lands is about as melodramatic and clearly pre-WWI as one could imagine. One way to look at this book, I guess the way it’s intended, is that Harry Feversham, on the eve of sailing to Sudan in the 1880s to war, resigns his commission and returns home. He meets up with his fiancé and while there receives a package, three white feathers which stand for accusations of cowardice. When she learns of what Harry has done, she […]

More Nabokov

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov

by Leave a Comment

Despair – 4/5 Literature is full of doubles. Whether this means the concept of foil characters who are designed to offset the lead character by contrast like Tybalt to Romeo or Fortinbras to Hamlet, twins and twinning, chiastic structures, repetitions in actions and plot, cycles of violence etc, or like literal doubles. In most of these stories where are actual double occurs we will get something like Mr Hyde as shadow-self to Dr Jeckyll or a trickster figure like in Dostoyevsky’s The Double and the […]

Hell is Here

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

by Leave a Comment

There is a lot going on within the pages of Hello Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. I will say that some of the bumps for me come from three main things. First and second are the version I read was an online reader copy. This is hard for me to read in this format and there were some major editing issues with whole two to four paragraphs being literally repeated. The final is it is a first novel, and therefore has some vanity […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo