Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Flight is but momentary escape from the eternal custody of earth.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

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CBR15 BINGO (Take to the Skies square: memoir written by the first person to fly nonstop from Europe to North America) BINGO! (Take to the Skies to Adulthood) For last year’s CBR Bingo, I read Circling the Sun by Paula McClain and loved it. I fell hard for the problematic but endlessly fascinating shenanigans of mostly swanky Europeans living, farming and cocktailing their way across East Africa. McClain’s novel centered on Beryl Markham who was the most interesting of the bunch. Raised on her father’s farm, she grew up with […]

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in…

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

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CBR15 BINGO ( In the Wild Square: Set in an unknown apocalyptic (?) wilderness. Scientists sent to explore.) For some as yet unexplained reason, a portion of the world called Area X has been blocked off from civilization. After several decades, a new ecosystem has taken over full of marshes and wildlife. To study the phenomenon, multiple expeditions of scientists have crossed over the border to map the area and take samples. Most of the scientists never returned and those few who did were husks of […]

…a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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CBR15 BINGO (On the Air square: Lots about radios and radio communication) BINGO! Dwelling to On The Air This is going to be a terrible review. I liked this book too much and generally, when that happens I freeze when trying to review it. Doerr’s book won the Pulitzer nearly a decade ago. I’ve had this book recommended to me countless times and, as is often the case with books everyone raves about, I put it on my virtual TBR pile and forget about it. Why do I […]

Hi, Goldbug…wherever you are.

Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry

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CBR15 BINGO (Nostalgia square: Read this to my kid a billion times.) Okay. This is going to be more about me than the book, but that’s nostalgia for you. We moved my son to college a few weeks ago. He’s our only kiddo. I’m an official empty nester now so I’m nostalgia-ing all over the place. He loved a lot of the Scarry books but this was his favorite. A superfan of all things vehicle-related, there was never a construction site or road re-surfacing that he […]

Beauty Queen

The Enchanters by James Ellroy

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Read as part of CBR15Bingo: hold steady. James Ellroy is a favorite author of mine; I return to his work often. This is the second in his Freddy Otash series. And it features a “protagonist” in a lot of trouble.  I only found out less than a month ago that James Ellroy was coming out with a new book. I keep my ear close to the ground as far as Ellroy is concerned so I’m not sure why the delayed announcement here. But I put […]

CBR15 Bingo: On the Road

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

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4.5 stars CBR15 Bingo: On the Road On a moon, (that seems quite like Earth in many respects) called Panga, people live peacefully together in harmonious small communities. There are remnants of a previous industrial age, and it’s suggested that there was a near apocalypse way back when, but humanity improved and started thinking about what was better for their environment, possibly helped by the exodus of their robots. At some point, in the distant past, many generations ago, the robots that had been working […]



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