Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“People always say that your wedding day is the happiest day of your life, but honestly, people should try solving murders more often.”

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

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CBR18 Bingo: Joker – Vera is a wild card in the investigation around Malcolm’s murder, and shakes up the lives of the suspects out of the blue. After a dead man is found in Vera Wong’s teahouse, being rather unimpressed by the police’s efforts, Vera decides to investigate the death herself. Unfortunately, she finds herself liking all her murder suspects a little too much. A word to the wise: Don’t read this book while hungry. Vera cooks up veritable feasts throughout the book, and the […]

“She’d played so many parts she hardly knew which one was her. She was an onion made of only skins with nothing at the centre.”

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

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Nowhere Book Bingo 26: Book rec from a friend (Ashley/Narfna loved this) Defeat the Goblin TBR: The Rogue Book – a book with politics/intrigue/sneakery involved (this book has all three and lots of it) CBR18 Bingo: Left (All of my fiction books are alphabetised by author, so Abercrombie comes to the very top left of the bookshelf it’s placed on) A cowardly monk. A mercenary. A vampire. A werewolf (who used to be a viking warrior). An elf. A necromancer. A knight who cannot die. […]

The Charms of a Competent Man

Lord Ravenscar's Revenge by Barbara Cartland

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After Romara is beaten and thrown out of the house by her sister’s abusive lover, the last thing she expects is to wake up married to Lord Ravenscar, who wed her while extremely drunk. But when he steps in to help her solve Caryl’s problems, she starts to wonder if they will be able to make a real marriage work. I read a lot of historical romance, so of course I am familiar with the insanely prolific Barbara Cartland, though I haven’t read any of […]

The Audacity of Princes

The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone

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Joanna I, Queen of Naples, is best known today for having stood trial for the murder of her husband during the height of the bubonic plague, but she faced many other challenges during her thirty-year-long reign. The whole time I was listening to this audiobook, I kept marveling at the absolute audacity of the royal men of this era, who over the decades launched a number of invasions and plots in an attempt to claim Naples for themselves. A woman on the throne seemed to […]

“Anybody who spends a lot of time burrowing through primary records of the old South is going to find almost anything they can imagine & more than a little that they never imagined.”

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely

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When people think of slavery in the American South, they usually imagine vast, intensely segregated plantations. However, usually Black people and their White enslavers lived cheek by jowl, and this terrible intimacy could give rise to many different kinds of tensions, as demonstrated by the six court cases covered in this book. Most of what I know about slavery in the United States was learned in the long ago days of high school and before, so I chose to pick up this book to both […]

On the Trail of Murderous Magic

The Helm of Midnight by Marina J. Lostetter

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After the dangerous relic of a serial killer is stolen in a daring heist, Krona and her fellow Regulators must uncover the greater conspiracy at play and recover the mask to keep the murders starting up again from beyond the grave. Not only is this book is an intriguing mix of fantasy, suspense thriller, and horror, but it is also stuffed chock-ful of unique world-building and follows three separate POVs, each with their own storyline. It definitely is a lot, but the author does a […]



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