Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Always and Forever My Favorite Jane Austen Book

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

by 2 Comments

CBR18BINGO: Refuge (comfort read) Has Pride and Prejudice always been this funny? I’ve easily read this at least half a dozen times, and I definitely recalled humorous moments, but my most recent re-read seemed to showcase more of them. Maybe it’s because it’s been a number of years since I read it, or that this is a new audiobook narrator for me, but either way it enhanced the reading experience. I’ve probably loved this book since the first time I read it, back when I was in […]

A graphic novel to introduce classic novels

The Night Librarian by Christopher Lincoln

by Leave a Comment

The New York Public Library has a secret. After hours, a group of librarians called The Night Librarians make sure book characters stay put in their books. You see, the older a book is, the more bored its characters are of reliving the same old story day after day. So the Night Librarians make sure Peter Pan flies back to Neverland and Scrooge stays put in Olde England, and most alarmingly, that Captain Hook, the ghosts, and other dangerous villains don’t wreak havoc on library […]

Well-Crafted but Emotionally Distant

Passing by Nella Larsen

by Leave a Comment

Passing is about Irene and Clare, two light-skinned Black women who are both capable of passing as White. Irene only does so when it’s convenient, like getting into a fancy hotel, but Clare is fully immersed in her life as the wife of a racist White man who does not know that Clare is biracial. The two women were childhood friends, but in her late teens, Clare disappears from the neighborhood, and the novel begins when the two incidentally cross paths 12 years later. It’s a […]

Living in Her Shadow

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

by Leave a Comment

Rebecca is often presented as a gothic novel, but it’s actually hard to pin down the genre. It has some gothic elements, some suspenseful elements, a marriage plot. Ultimately, I would characterize it as psychologically suspenseful litfic. The psychological suspense relates to the narrator, who remains unnamed for the entirety of the book. Twenty-one at the start of the novel, she is working as a lady’s “companion” in Monte Carlo, when she meets and falls in love with widower Maxim de Winter, and they marry within […]

An Early Work by Dostoevsky

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

by Leave a Comment

If you’re interested in reading classic literature, this is a good one to start with. Clocking in at under 70 pages (as least according to my Kindle), this novella is told as the diary of an unnamed narrator recounting a few nights with a young woman in Petersburg. Our narrator meets Nastenka on a street one night after rescuing her from a man who was accosting her. He had previously observed her on the bank of a river and noticed her crying, but she ran […]

Who knew a book with “bleak” in the title could be so much fun? (with helpful charts!)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

by 7 Comments

Bleak House has been brooding on my TBR list for years because, even though I’m a long-time Dickens fan, I was intimidated by the length and by what I perceived would be a weighty novel. I’m ecstatic that I overcame my hesitance, because this novel was more fun than a mariachi band on a roller coaster. Sure, about 9 people die, but you can’t make gruel without smashing a few oats, right? There are so many characters that the death toll amounts to maybe 12%, and […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo