Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“If a book is well-written, I always find it too short”

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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4.5 stars CBR17 Bingo: Black (a book with a black cover) I had completely forgotten that I read and reviewed this book back in 2016. My original review can be found here. My plot summary of the more than 200-year-old novel can be found in my previous review. Nevertheless, my reading experience this time around was different enough from earlier times that I wanted to write about some of my thoughts and observations, not to mention some of the points of discussion that came up during my […]

Creating a language is no joke. Or, maybe it is, because I laughed a lot reading this book.

In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent

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CBR 17 BINGO: Diaspora. The author uses the Jewish diaspora to illustrate the remarkable resurgence of Hebrew as a spoken language. You could also argue that Esperanto speakers form a diaspora. When you think of “invented” languages, you might immediately think of Esperanto, the late-19th century experiment in creating a universal language to bring people closer together. Or you might think about Star Trek geeks going all-in on their hobby by learning Klingon. Or you might ponder J.R.R. Tolkien’s elvish languages, created decades before he […]

CBR17 Book Bingo Reading Challenge Wrap-up

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Thank you to everyone who has joined me on this bingo journey! I couldn’t do this without all of you, whether you wrote one review, or 25. None of this would happen without yesknopemaybe, who creates the best book bingo cards on the internet, and MsWas, who tells me every year that I can do this. On to the wrap-up. Initially, I wanted to make this year’s bingo categories easy, because I knew this would be a hard year for a lot of us. But then […]

A Very Satisfying Conclusion

The Crimson Crown by Cinda Williams Chima

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Raisa takes the throne as Queen, but there is still much work to be done as well as the threat of invasion.  Someone is murdering wizards, political machinations abound, and pressure for Raisa to marry.  Raisa and Han are struggling both with the fact that almost everyone seems to be against Han in general and their relationship isn’t officially allowed.  Plus between each of their duties, they don’t see each other much and are not sharing all of their plans with each other.  As the […]

“I have just drawn my weapon and killed a Coke machine, sir.” CBRBINGO – Green (BINGO!)

The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

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According to many Constant Readers, this is Uncle Stevie’s worst book, but I don’t agree! It is extremely flawed, but I also found it very readable (it probably helped that Edward Herrmann narrates the audiobook, and he is a wonderful audiobook narrator). This is sci-fi horror. A woman named Bobbie, a writer of western novels, finds a buried object in the ground and becomes obsessed with unearthing it. Doing so changes her and the town she lives in forever, and in really really creepy ways. […]

“He flopped sideways, mute testament to the greatest fighting technique of all: a friend behind your enemy.”

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

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The Devils is my first Abercrombie book. I’ve had Half a King on my TBR for over a decade, but it hadn’t made its way onto an annual list yet. But as is often the case over the past many years narfna reviewed something ecstatically which had me checking to see if it fit a reading challenge (I’m counting this as weird horror for Read Harder and Black for CBR Bingo) and then it made its way to this year’s list.  My brain is tired having finished the nearly 550 pages of this book. But the good kind of tired. The “I just […]



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