Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Good Thing Climate Change is a Hoax, Right? Right?

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

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cbr18bingo Refuge I kept seeing this title and I was intrigued.  Is this some sort of seacoast bodice ripper?  Well, no, actually.  But why yes it was great, and all bodices remained intact. The setting is based off of an actual place, Macquarie Island, located about half way between Tasmania and Antarctica.  It is the location of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, with a treasure chest of seeds collected world-wide for . . . just in case.  It’s only inhabited by a scientific team, and […]

Solid Thriller

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

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Bingo: Justice I saw the movie Mystic River, based on Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, years ago. I remember thinking it was very good. I forgot most of the plot, so I picked the book up. The story features Jimmy, an ex-con. When he was young, his friends Sean and Danny were playing when a car pulls up to them. The men inside kidnap Danny and he escapes four days later, having been sexually abused. The book then jumps 25 years in the […]

How to lose my interest in this series

How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

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CBR18 BINGO: One, because it’s first in a series. Also, it’s the only one of the series I plan to read. In 1965, teenager Frances Adams visits a fortune teller who makes an ominous prediction about Frances being murdered. The prediction includes the typical 1-800-PSYCHIC ambiguity that can easily be self-fulfilling, like the dangers of “holding a queen in the palm of one hand,” or the suggestion that a “bird” will betray her. Frances spends the next 60 years in an extreme state of paranoia, […]

Get Off My Island!

Eden Undone by Abbott Kahler

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CBR18 Bingo: Sheep – The doctor and Dore, and later the Wittmers, all come to Floreana hoping to live simpler, more rustic lives, growing their own food and tending to their own animals. When Friedrich, a German doctor, and his former patient and lover Dore decide to move to an uninhabited Galapagos island in search of a pastoral setting for their self-improvement, they did not know the publicity and violence that would follow. I had a vague recollection of this bizarre story from hearing about […]

CBRBINGO: Friends—”I was most flattered when I was called the Steven Spielberg of Sitcoms, and in response to that, Steven called me and told me that he wanted to be known as the James Burrows of movies.”

Directed by James Burrows by James Burrows

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I bought this at Book Outlet earlier this year (or late last year? what is time) and didn’t feel any particular rush to get to it. Then James Burrows died in June, and now just felt like the right time. This is a career-focused memoir told by James Burrows to Eddy Friedfield, who compiled it all into a book. You can definitely tell that Burrows is not a writer (a fact that he opines at least four times throughout the book—is this irony or what?) […]

“We all love an easy buck.”

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin

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CBR18 BINGO: Wealth because much wealth was gained and lost “Temptation has driven  human folly for centuries, whether the serpent in the Garden of Eden or the market manias of cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence. Each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again.” I’m old enough to remember the 1987 stock market crash. The dot-com bubble of the early 2000s dashed my hopes of getting rich off of the stock options I […]



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