Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

a re-read of a play before a once-in-a-lifetime viewing

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn

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CBR Bingo: Success, because a lot of the back and forth in this is about Heisenberg defending his successes in the German nuclear program versus Bohr’s more success-y success with The Manhattan Project. SO the story here: I’ve been wanting to see this play performed live for, oh, 10-15 years? I saw Michael Frayn’s Noises Off on Broadway and thought it was absolutely hilarious, looked into what else he’d written, and found this. Read the actual script, fell in love, watched the made-for-TV adaptation starring Daniel Craig […]

Pairs well with the US Open happening now

In Your Court: Serve or Receive? by Kit Haley

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CBR18 Bingo: Season – Tennis court seasons (hard court, clay, grass, etc…) Miles Callahan and Matteo Russo are rivals. Miles is ranked number four in the world and is America’s next big tennis hope. Matteo, an Australian former teenage tennis phenom, is unranked and is fighting his way back into professional tennis after taking years off to recover from a devastating accident when he was nineteen. To compete at the professional level, Matteo pays his own way and doesn’t have the sponsorship deals that normally […]

Hack Your Way Out of Your Troubles

Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James

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CBR18 Bingo: Repair – The axe is a tool used to fix a lot of things – houses, sheds, ships.  In this book, it can provide a murderous solution to people’s problems too. The phrase ‘axe murder’ conjures images of a brutal, gruesome, and somewhat old-fashioned crime. The history of the axe murder is much longer than its presence in newspapers though, and more intimately intertwined with the lives of its perpetuators and its victims than one might think. Firstly, Whack Job is a truly excellent […]

a pale replacement for my disappointment in the last Death novel from Discworld

Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves

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CBR Bingo: And, because I think the use of the “and” in the title of this book is particularly punchy–melodically to the ear, stylistically, as a plot point Well, might as well keep at it reviewing the more morose books in my back catalogue (having just finished Giovanni’s Room. This is a book about Travis Smith, a sort of scruffy looking nondescript 30s something dude who is a real person but also the(?) a(?) personification of death who shows up both as people are dying and […]

Sometimes a Friend Group is Just a Girl and a Murderous Haunted Doll

She's A Doll by Barbara Truelove

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CBR18 Bingo: Friends – The emotional center of this story is the friendship between Lucy and Nicola. After Lucy is murdered by her best friend’s brother, she does not go gently into that good night but instead possess a porcelain doll and decides that she must kill Kyle. But a doll body is weak, so she turns to Nicola, a former classmate, for help in her mission. I’ve long believed that horror and humor are two sides of the same coin, so I really enjoy when […]

there’s no HEA in this m/m romance

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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CBR Bingo: Wheel, mainly for the cyclic nature of David’s relationship with Giovanni (and Hella) post- the idyllic room bit, where he goes around and around about what he wants A short, bittersweet plot about David, an Américain in Paris in the late 50s/early 60s (I think) who is nominally engaged to a modern lady who is currently in Spain trying to figure out if she loves David enough to get married. They’re very open minded, you see, until Hella realizes all she wants is […]



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