Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Does Crime Pay?

Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano by Andris Kurins and Joseph F. O'Brien

Sacred by Dennis Lehane

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I hadn’t meant to review these books together but I finished Sacred sooner than I anticipated and it just makes sense to cover them both in one review…   Boss of Bosses I just finished rewatching The Godfather in honor of its 50th anniversary and I decided to tackle this one because the agents applied the movie title as a sobriquet for Paul Castellano, the mob boss of the Gambino crime family who is perhaps most famous as being the guy in John Gotti’s way that got killed in […]

January 2022 Leftovers

Hit Parade by Lawrence Block

Sex Criminals, Volume 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky

Devils In Exile by Chuck Hogan

Ex Machina, The Deluxe Edition: Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny

Munich by Robert Harris

Shella by Andrew Vachss

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz

No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfeld

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

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My resolution for Cannonball Read in 2022 is to only write reviews where I feel like I have much to say and then dump the others in a singular post at the end of the month to track how much I’ve read. This’ll spare me from writing 250+ words about books that I can’t even think of a hundred for. So… Hit Parade **** I enjoy these books and while this is the one I maybe enjoyed the least (did EVERY story need cutaway conversations with […]

I always had a soft spot for the ol’ spook

Who Was Edgar Allan Poe? by Jim Gigliotti

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Once you recommend one book in the Who Was series (Who Was, Who Is, even What Is) you have pretty much said everything you need about them. They are fun, simple, and while might not get “down and dirty” you do find a little dust here and there. I tend to like the books about people over the “things” or events (though the Ice Age was interesting as it showed that we are still learning about it, even though it seems like something that is […]

Two Entirely Different Kinds of Pirates

Pirate Queen: A Story of Zheng Yi Sao by Helaine Becker, Ill. Liz Wong

What Isabella Wanted: Isabella Stewart Gardner Builds a Museum by Candace Fleming Ill. Matthew Cordell

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But Fortune cares nothing for your dreams. She takes up your life in her cup and shakes it so hard your teeth rattle in your head and your heart roars like a dragon in your chest. Then she throws the bones onto her table of lacquer and jade. Your fate is sealed. – Helaine Becker, Pirate Queen: A Story of Zheng Yi Sao Did I know much about Zheng Yi Sao before I read this? Only that she existed, reigned over the South China Sea […]

Now I Can (Also) Die in Peace

Now I Can Die in Peace by Bill Simmons

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I want to begin by acknowledging that I am writing a review of a book whose appeal starts out extremely limited to a specific region and demographic, and only becomes more so due to the incredible untimeliness of when I finally got around to reading it.  Yes, in the waning days of that black hole we called 2020, I finally got around to reading Now I Can Die in Peace, a collection of sports (specifically, New England Sports, and more specifically, Red Sox baseball) essays, […]

cbr12bingo – Happy!

Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms by John Hodgman

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“Hey, it’s John Hodgman!” John Hodgman used to spend a considerable amount of time on TV. He’s played, in his words, all sorts of “sexless weirds” in TV and commercials alike. He spent time on The Daily Show as, among other things, a deranged billionaire. He left his Daily Show role behind as Trump rose to power, as there is nothing funny anymore about criminally insane rich people.  He isn’t spending too much time on TV at the moment; it’s been years since he was the PC of […]



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