Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

The Book Bingo Reading Challenge is Here
> FAQ Home
> Tag: Baltimore

Will You Ever Win?

Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

by 1 Comment

Laura Lippman continues to outdo herself. After an entertaining (but pedestrian by recent standards) standalone in The Lady on the Lake, she again finds the form she had in Sunburn. I don’t know yet which is better but I know I liked them both a lot. While I guess it’s somewhat of a mystery, this book is a horror, with transparent shades of Stephen King’s Misery. And yet, Lippman is able to make it a work all of her own by taking the piggish perspective of Gerry, the writer, and […]

a sweet and familiar coming-of-age story that sidestepped my biggest worries

Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau

by Leave a Comment

Let me start out with a BIG sigh of relief: WHEW!!!! That was a CLOSE one! In a story where a 14 year old girl is introduced to sex, drugs, and rock and roll things could have gone quickly and irreparably off the rails- especially with blurbs on the jacket comparing Mary Jane to Daisy Jones and the Six and Almost Famous! Don’t get me wrong: I loved Almost Famous as a teen, but it does not treat it’s female characters with much kindness. I found Daisy Jones to be […]

Charm City’s Worst

We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption in an American City by Justin Fenton

by Leave a Comment

It’s wild to read this as the trial of Derek Chauvin is going on. I left Baltimore at the end of 2016. Was there for the 2015 Uprising. I know firsthand that the tension which boiled over in April of that year had never really settled. Baltimore has the same social issues and structural inequalities as most American metropolises. It’s over-policed and under-resourced, riddled with a white supremacist power structure that is almost impossible to reform. People demand reform but also want “results” in the […]

Bad Men

Quarry by Max Allan Collins

I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad by Baynard Woods & Brandon Sodeberg

by 1 Comment

I read two books over the weekend about bad men. One fiction, one non-fiction. Both good in their own respective ways. Quarry 4 stars This month’s Hard Case Crime tale was one I had actually been avoiding for a while. I find Max Allan Collins to be insufferable. In interviews I’ve read with him, he seems to be the kind of blowhard-ish know-it-all I don’t care for in the crime community. His verbal racism at the Shamus Awards was obnoxious. Really, how hard is it to […]

No Surprises

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

by Leave a Comment

Bingo: Red I read recently that people who tend toward anxiety prefer to watch TV shows and movies that they’ve already seen, because then there’s no anxiety about how things turn out. I think this is true for books, too. I would always, always, prefer to read something I’ve read before–even if I didn’t love it the first time around. I think this is one reason I always return to Anne Tyler–even if it’s a book of hers that I’ve never read before, I know […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo