Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“The Next Right Thing”

Gigs by Mark Mosedale and Si Smith

by Leave a Comment

Right now, I really dislike Mark Mosedale, Si Smith,Top Shelf Productions, and the person who sent me the reader’s copy of Gigs by Smosedale and illustrated by Smith. I dislike you because you made me feel all the emotions at once. You made me unable to put my reader copy down. You made me want to finish before it comes out mid-June 2026 so I can get it on release day, stand at the front doors and tell customers, “You ain’t leaving until you buy […]

The Architecture of Our New Digital Cage

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

by Leave a Comment

  There’s a whole literary field of broken dreams on our addiction to smart phones. The Art of Surveillance Capitalism talks about how our data is harvested, Irresistible looks at how tech companies keep us hooked, while The Shallows shows how our concentration span is reduced. The Twittering Machine sits among these, but offers a different slant. What if we are being enslaved by our devices, what if they’re robbing us of our surplus value?   It’s a very Marxist critique of the rise of […]

Does this author ever write a bad book?

Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel

by Leave a Comment

Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel This graphic novel is not perfect, but it is darn close. There were just one or two small “bumps” for me. But overall fans will get a huge kick out of this. There is much happening and Bechdel uses their usual wit and observations to get the job done. Even if they cannot get the job of writing their new book or the TV script done. It is life during the years of 2020 to “now” (or around […]

Happy or Wealthy, But Not Both

Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies by Laura Thompson

by Leave a Comment

Though you’d think money smoothes away all obstacles, it seems in the lives of these heiresses to be the thing that stands between them and happiness. Using the examples of individual heiresses to make her case, Thompson shows how the lives of heiresses evolved with the times, and what they may need to achieve happiness in their different ways. The book is broken down into four sections which deal with different eras of heiresses, from the heiress abductions of the Georgian times to the American […]

A rush through the author’s experience

Home Body by Rupi Kaur

by Leave a Comment

Let me start by stating that my exposure to poetry is very limited. I have, to my knowledge, read only one or two full collections of poems, so take this entire review with a grain of salt. Home Body by Rupi Kaur is broken down into four parts: mind, heart, rest, and awake. In mind Kaur writes of her depression, anxiety, and her struggles with worth and acceptance. In heart, Kaur write of love: its loss, its elusion, and its impact. In rest, Kaur write of just that. […]

A Hundred Years On, It Still Mostly Holds Up

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin

by Leave a Comment

Best for: People interested in a sense of what the Marxist philosophers were saying in the 1900s. Admittedly a niche market at this point (for now, anyway). In a nutshell: The title basically nails it – Lenin argues that Imperialism is Capitalism at its end. Worth quoting: “..for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production.” Why I chose it: It was assigned as part of the Marxist […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo