Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A break from the norm, but everything is too rushed

The Magicians: New Class by Lilah Sturges

by Leave a Comment

A group of hedge witches are being enrolled at Brakebills as third year students much to the dismay of the students who have been studying at Brakebills since year one. There’s obvious tension between the hedge witches and the Brakebills students, but they’re being forced to work and study together. Initially they’re told it’s to bridge the gap between the two magical worlds, but the students soon learn the truth. They will be learning battle magic, an outlawed practice, in order to be prepared for […]

Go Down, Moses

Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner

by Leave a Comment

My estimation for this book continues to grow as I read and re-read throughout my life. I first read it in college, and the complexity of Faulkner’s portrayal of interior lives and families was about all I could handle in one of his novels. I could also handle the stark portrayals of race and gender in something like Light in August as well. But this book which attempts to complexly show interiority of white and Black characters, how those characters interact not only within a […]

Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers

by Leave a Comment

This is probably the first book I read about the US/Vietnam War, and it probably shaped a lot of my thinking about it and my viewing and reading future books and movies. I cannot confirm whatsoever that I didn’t watch movies about Vietnam before reading this, so it’s hard to know what I brought into my first reading of it in 8th grade. So if I watched Full Metal Jacket when I was ten (why you ask? Because it was the 1990s and I am […]

I Should Reread These Modesty Blaise Books in Order

A Taste for Death by Peter O'Donnell

by 1 Comment

I enjoy rereading all the Modesty Blaise novels, but two of the characters who fall in love in this book were an old married couple in the last one. While the exploits of Modesty and her partner, Willie Garvin, are exciting, this has one of the best fight scenes in all the Modesty novels. In fact, she has a scary encounter with a swordsman AND Willie meets up with a gorilla-like sadist who had battered him almost to the death during a previous encounter. Stuck […]

“If you wanted a thin daughter, you should not have married a man whose female ancestors carried cows home from the pasture.”

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie

by 2 Comments

A relationship that starts with a bet is a really, really hard trick to pull off.  Crusie manages to pull off a non-problematic bet trope, which would have surprised me now, and certainly surprises me with a book published in 2004, or the Decade of Problematic Nonsense With The Added Indignity Of Low Rise Jeans. Plot: Calvin is a small business owner that knows that the only way a small business succeeds is keeping his clients happy. So when one of his client challenges him […]

I Am in Actual Awe

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas

by 7 Comments

Bryce Quinlan lives a charmed life in Crescent City, despite her dubious status as a half-human citizen of the Empire. But all that changes when her best friend is murdered viciously. Now, two years later, she discovers that most everything she believed about that murder may be a lie. I will go on record about this; I am eating my words. A few years ago, on the recommendation of my sister, I started reading the Throne of Glass series. I thought the first book was […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo