Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Irredeemable First Person

You by Caroline Kepnes

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Bingo: Map. Obsessive narrator maps every detail of his stalkee’s life. Have you ever read a book so awful it actually made you angry? Such is Caroline Kepnes’s You for me. The plot is easily summed up: a deranged bookstore worker fixates on a customer, getting more and more obsessed so that he commits multiple murders. He follows her, he accesses her email, he is a peeping tom, he sexually obsesses in repulsive fashion. The narrator is absolutely repugnant. The murders are the least of […]

Don’t judge a movie by its book

The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

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Did Joe R. Lansdale have Peter Dinklage in mind when he wrote the character Shorty’s look, or was I projecting? Maybe a bit of one, a lot of the other. You see, the novel, The Thicket, only came to be on my TBR list because I had seen the movie starring Dinklage. I won’t go into that too much, but will say it is not a horrible movie as it had its moments, and I had fun picking apart those, “You did that?” scenes. But […]

Very Mixed Bag

Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane

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Bingo: Steal. Little girl is stolen from her mother. I read Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River recently and found it a solid thriller. I thought I’d pick up another of his books, Gone Baby Gone, but it wasn’t nearly as good. It seems the book is a part of a series featuring two private investigators, Patrick and Angie. Professional partners as well as lovers, they are brought in on a case about a missing girl. The girl’s mother is negligent and leaves the girl alone while […]

Putting the Sex in Texas

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

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Listen for the Lie, by Amy Tintera, is the other book that I took with me on vacation last week, as a backup to The Ferryman. Like The Ferryman, it is a mystery. Unlike The Ferryman, the ending wasn’t particularly interesting, exciting or unexpected. Instead, the final chapters of Listen for the Lie were just super horny. In fact, the whole book was surprisingly sexually charged for being about a non-sexual murder. It’s almost like someone told the author that sure, murder is okay, but […]

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

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I got nothing. This was really not a good book. It was not necessary to tell at all. It added nothing. It took to more than halfway through the book before you even get to the start of the Games. And then it just floundered worst than the first half. There’s an ending that some fans will love since we get to hear about some beloved characters, but frankly it’s not worth your time. Maybe if this had been a novella with some flashbacks to […]

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

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I am going to be honest here. If I didn’t need to read this book for a bingo game I am playing, I would have quit this after a few chapters. It’s not a bad book or anything. It’s just a lot of stuff being thrown at you. I would also say that if you haven’t read works by Alexandre Dumas, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, and many others, you are going to be at a loss for some of the literary references that are tossed […]



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