Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“We all love an easy buck.”

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin

by Leave a Comment

CBR18 BINGO: Wealth because much wealth was gained and lost “Temptation has driven  human folly for centuries, whether the serpent in the Garden of Eden or the market manias of cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence. Each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again.” I’m old enough to remember the 1987 stock market crash. The dot-com bubble of the early 2000s dashed my hopes of getting rich off of the stock options I […]

When you want a job done right, send in the Vermont gal

Rock Star: How Ursula Marvin Mapped Moon Rocks and Meteorites by Sandra Neil Wallace and Nancy Carpenter

by Leave a Comment

Ursula Marvin didn’t have rocks in the head, but she had rocks on the brain! And meteorites and all sorts of neat science things. She was a girl who was told “learn to cook.” And instead, she decided to cook up some good trouble by finding moon rocks, meteorites and more in the harsh Antarctic landscape. This picture book biography, Rock Star: How Ursula Marvin Mapped Moon Rocks and Meteorites by Sandra Neil Wallace and illustrator Nancy Carpenter is a fun introduction to a woman […]

Wombat in a strange land

Digger, Volume One by Ursula Vernon

by Leave a Comment

If Lord of the Rings, Redwall and Haru by Joe Latham had a book baby (though I’m assuming Haru could have been influenced by this story) Digger, Volume One by Ursula Vernon would be the result. It is funny, dense, dark, mysterious, slow in parts, yet it keeps you hooked wondering what is next. It is not for young or sensitive readers, as the images are mostly “tame,” the text and descriptions are not always so. The black and white art is both positive and […]

No one has enemies

Vinland Saga by Makoto Yukimura

by Leave a Comment

CBR18 Bingo – Versus: it’s literally about Vikings. My tolerance for real violence is much lower than my tolerance for fictional violence. So when I read fictionalized versions of real war, I bounce between “cool battle!” and “I hate that this happened.” Makoto Yukimura’s Vinland Saga heavily leans toward the “I hate that this happened” reaction because the battles aren’t cool. They’re just violent and sad. Thorfinn is a Viking boy in Iceland. He has a happy life that’s full of sheep and stories from […]

Yabba Dabba Ghost

Diary of a Dinoghost V01Unlikely Friends by Monica Arnaldo

Diary of a Dinoghost V02 Sworn Enemies by Monica Arnaldo

by Leave a Comment

I had a list of online reader copies. And Diary of a Dinoghost boos …   I mean books … one and two kept coming up. I figured I had a few days to read them as the first Unlikely Friends was due in August 2026 and two is due in November 2026 under the name, Sworn Enemies. They are both written and illustrated by Monica Arnaldo and are part of the A Branches Book grouping. Anyway, I kept putting them off, but one day […]

Please, DON’T send in the clown

Hamlet is Not OK by R.A. Spratt

by Leave a Comment

As a teen (at least 13 and up), Hamlet is Not OK by R.A. Spratt and I would have been friends. This is because I, too, would have had some of the naive ideas about violence and mental health our main character has. Now, I still am not keen on violence as the solution and I understand the difficulties of mental health, but if you change Hamlet (and SPOILER, they do) you have changed practically everything that has come after that was inspired by it, […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo