Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Clearing the Cache

Coma by Robin Cook

Rules of Prey by John Sandford

Twilight of the Democracies by Anne Applebaum

by Leave a Comment

Coma – 2/5 Stars I wasn’t alive when this book or the first of the tv movies came out, but Robin Cook also wrote a book called Outbreak, which shares a lot of parallels with the Richard Preston book The Hot Zone and the movie. I also distinctly remember seeing ads for an early 1990s mini-series based on another of his books. If you’ve read The Firm, you might have felt a similar kind of disappointment in finding out the ultimate resolution of the mystery […]

The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter

Mr. Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe

by Leave a Comment

Today Billy Wilder is remembered as one of Hollywood’s greatest film directors, but because his masterpieces are all in black and white, many film buffs might not realize that he continued making movies all the way until 1981. Jonathan Coe’s novel Mr. Wilder & Me finds the director shooting one of his later films, 1978’s Fedora. On the outs with the Hollywood studios, Wilder is forced to accept foreign money to finance the picture, which he films in Greece, Germany, and France. The return to […]

“The only good thing this broken heart of mine can feel is love for you.”

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

by 4 Comments

The Heart Principle was delayed a year while its author Helen Hoang dealt with some personal traumas which she goes into in depth in the Author’s Note. Many of those traumas feed directly into the re-worked plot of this book. I’m firmly in the camp that this is a romance, even if the romance plotline finds itself uncentered through sections of the work, but this is certainly not a rom-com style book as its cover would want you to believe – in fact I have […]

I finally get around to actually reading Olivia Dade

Teach Me by Olivia Dade

by 5 Comments

4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Rec’d (by Emmalita, Narfna and FaintingViolet) Official book description: Their lesson plans didn’t include love. But that’s about to change… When Martin Krause arrives at Rose Owens’s high school, she’s determined to remain chilly with her new colleague. Unfriendly? Maybe. Understandable? Yes, since a loathsome administrator gave Rose’s beloved world history classes to Martin, knowing it would hurt her. But keeping her distance from a man as warm and kind as Martin will prove challenging, even for a stubborn, guarded ice queen. Especially when she begins […]

“She used to think the sea the one blessing of winter: even though the world around her was bleak, the water seldom lost its color. Today the contrast between the dead black and the rich blue is almost impossible to believe in.”

The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve

by Leave a Comment

In one word: Unrelenting Cannonball Bingo Bingo: Book Club I picked up this book as it was the September offering of my local library book club that was meeting in person for the first time in five-ever. This was a great book for a book club, in that opinions varied on its merits, and “based on a true story” historical fiction is ripe for conversation. The story is based on a real coastal wildfire that took place in Maine in 1947. In the beginning, this […]

“I wondered what it was like to live without that weight on your shoulders, the weight of the murdered ancestors, the stolen land, the abused children, the burden every Native person carries.” #CBRBINGO – Fauna

Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

by Leave a Comment

Virgil Wounded Horse is an enforcer on the Rosebud reservation, the home of the Lakota in South Dakota. Due to some fucked up laws, felonies are subject to federal prosecution, and the feds refuse to prosecute many serious crimes on the reservation, leaving murders, rapes, you name it, uninvestigated. The residents turn to Virgil. For some extra cash, he’ll give the perpetrator a beat down, oftentimes a very violent one. Vigilante justice is more reliable than the so-called justice of white people. The plot kicks […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo