Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

The realness of the story is what makes it so terrifying

Tell Me What I Am: A Novel by Una Mannion

by Leave a Comment

Cbr16bingo Golden, +2 bingos This novel won the Crime Writer Association’s 2024 Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. It is a riveting, disturbing and heartbreaking story that I didn’t want to put down. At the center of it is the disappearance of Deena Garvey and its impact on her daughter Ruby and sister Nessa. Una Mannion takes us back to the events leading up to Deena’s disappearance and then forward some 15 years later where the reverberations of this traumatic event […]

“…all you can truly say of any historical event … is that ‘something happened.’”

The Sense of an Ending: A Novel by Julian Barnes

by 1 Comment

Cbr16bingo Free Spot (sub for Rings square), +3 bingos The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel that won the Booker Prize. It is short but manages to delve into deep themes regarding memory, history and remorse through a story with a surprising finish. Told in two parts by the same narrator, Tony Webster, the reader must constantly question Tony’s memory and reliability, as he himself does. Part 1 of the novel finds Tony as a teenager in the 1960s with his friends in […]

The TV Series is Better

The Umbrella Academy Vol.1: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.2: Dallas by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.3: Hotel Oblivion by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

by Leave a Comment

Cbr16bingo Earth Day, bingo I really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy series on Netflix and just did a binge of the first three seasons before watching the fourth and final season. Overall, I thought it was excellent. The resolution to the series was great and made sense of a lot of stuff that had been unresolved. I knew it was based on a graphic novel series and decided to pick it up and see how the the TV series compares to the original, and surprisingly for […]

FOMO/YOLO, MOFO!

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

by Leave a Comment

Cbr16bingo Tech I only picked this up in order to fill the Tech square on my bingo card. It’s not the kind of book I would have looked at otherwise — nonfiction with an emphasis on military flights and the space program? Ugh, no thanks. But in Tom Wolfe’s hands, the topic does become more interesting and readable. The book started as an article for Rolling Stone Magazine about that certain quality that the men involved in the early days of the space program seemed to […]

Moody Detective Fiction in the North Country

The Woman Who Married a Bear by John Straley

by Leave a Comment

What happens when you take the elements of a pulp fiction crime novel but move it up to the 80s and set it in Alaska? You get Cecil Younger, the alcoholic private investigator main character of The Woman Who Married a Bear. We meet Cecil the morning after a bender, as he battles a hangover while preparing to meet a potential new client. The client, an older Tlingit woman, asks Cecil to find out who killed her son, Louis Victor. Only problem is, Victor’s killer […]

Science begins at home (includes link to a fun video if you’re having a bad day)

One Wild Bird at a Time by Bernd Heinrich

by Leave a Comment

CBR16 BINGO: Earth Day, because it’s about observing birds and nature BINGO (diagonal): Bananas, Cult, Dreams, Earth Day, Rings Bernd Heinrich is a biologist/naturalist/professor who has written numerous books about birds and bird behavior. I’ve read some of his other books and found them to be a little dense, but he is clearly an expert in the field and an avid bird lover. In One Wild Bird at a Time, he encourage his readers to conduct their own experiments by closely observing the world around […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo