Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Talking about my generation

Kills Well With Others: A Novel by Deanna Raybourn

by Leave a Comment

In the sequel to Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn takes us on another thrill ride with four retired assassins and a couple of their significant others. Billie, Helen, Natalie and Mary Alice have been working together since the late 1970s for a secret organization called the Museum. Originally, the Museum was meant to track down Nazis and the works of art that they had stolen and smuggled out of Europe. Nowadays, the Museum, under the direction of a very competent young woman named […]

“Money, money, money!” Or, greedy Victorian bastards

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

by Leave a Comment

I’ve had the idea in the back of my mind for a long time that I’d like to read every full-length Dickens novel, but I only just recently decided to get serious about it. For some reason, I decided that also should include re-reading ones that I don’t remember well. I vaguely remember enjoying Our Mutual Friend when I read it about 15 years ago, but I couldn’t remember the details. First takeaway: Even by Dickens’ standards, this novel feels a trifle padded. I generally […]

A Regency Parent Trap retelling

Better Than a Duke by Suzanne Enoch

by Leave a Comment

Thank you to NetGalley and Bramble for this ARC. My opinions are my own. Beckett Raines, the Marquis of Hentrose, has been widowed for ten years, leaving him a single father to young Rebecca (who would like to be known as Lady Becks). He’s been aided by a number of loyal servants, but now his meddling mother has decided that it’s time for him to marry an appropriate woman who can be a good role model to the girl. Because Beckett was guided by his […]

Now A Major Motion Picture And Sadly A Common Story on The News

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

by Leave a Comment

  It has been over 50 years since James Baldwin penned this powerful fiction, yet very little seems to have changed. If Beale Street Could Talk straddles genres: it is a tender love story between Tish and Fonny, a slice-of-life drama of the 1970s New York Black experience, and a tense courtroom procedural. While some cultural references have aged, the catalyst—Fonny’s false arrest by a cop who takes personal offense at his existence—remains as common today as it was then. Baldwin’s prose lifts these characters […]

The Earl and the Sheepfarmer

In Which Winnie Halifax is Utterly Ruined by Alexandra Vasti

by Leave a Comment

Reading Rainbow – Purple/violet cover It’s 1811. Winnifred “Winnie” Wallace just wants to settle down in a small town in Wales and raise sheep. She has a modest amount of money, given to her by her con woman mother before said woman absconded to France. However, being a single woman trying to establish herself leads to a lot of suspicion, so Winnie fibs a tiny bit and claims to be married, but estranged from her husband. She literally makes up a name and an address […]

We’re all just screaming into an algorithmic void

Minority Rule by Ash Sarkar

by 2 Comments

  I recently rewatched The Social Network. Fifteen years on, it stands as a digital autopsy for the birth of “Tech Bro” culture and the death of nuanced debate. The subsequent rise of Facebook, Twitter, and their algorithm-driven culture wars has accelerated societal conversation away from material inequality and toward the friction of identity politics. In her first book, Ash Sarkar encourages us to look beneath this noise at the deeper fractures of class. She rightly argues that identity politics has a vital place in […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo