Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

You Get Your Choices and You Take Your Chances

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

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cbr18bingo Or (like it says above) This is the third book from Whitehead that I have read – each one a treat and all so very different.  No matter what the subject matter is, he is just a flat out good writer.  (The other two were Sag Harbor and Harlem Shuffle, by the way).  There is a reason he won two Pulitzers in a row. Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner are two black teenagers who end up in the reform school Nickel Academy (based on […]

Part 8

My Friends by Fredrik Backman, Neil Smith (Translator)

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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Book 36: My Friends by Fredrik Backman, Neil Smith (Translator) Rough Review: 5 stars. I have so many thoughts and feelings about this book. AND SPOILERS NO TIME TO REDACT. The first 70 pages or so were perfect. Just quirky and heartfelt and true, and SO funny, these sensitive, awkward little weirdos with too many feelings, lucky enough to find their people, for however brief a time. I thought there was no way he could keep it up for 400+ pages, and if he did, I would […]

The Walking Dull

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

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I’m not sure if Zone One by Colson Whitehead is actually a Pulitzer Prize winner or not, but I can tell you one thing: I’ve made it to the 30% mark and I can go no further. I have never been bored so stiff by a zombie novel in all my days—and I’ve read a lot of zombie novels. This meandering, overwritten, richly-prosed-but-empty-on-characterisation slog has almost killed my love of reading. I’ve been stuck on it for over two months and yet, every time I […]

An Odyssey Through Horror and Sanctuary

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was the kind of five star read that made me adjust the rating of an earlier review, because I realized Whitehead’s book was so much stronger. So I went back and re-ranked the previous book as four stars–still very good, but not the same experience. The Underground Railroad follows Cora, a slave during the pre-Civil War era. In the beginning of the book, Cora is a slave on a large plantation. Her mother Mabel was the only slave on the […]

A Whole Lot to Juggle

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

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CBR15 Bingo Hold Steady So Harlem in the 60’s.  Everyone’s just trying to get by.  Ray Carney’s worked his way from a hardscrabble youth to being a solid family man with an up and coming furniture store on 125th.  But there is his cousin and best friend, Freddie.  Ray’s mother was long gone and his dad was always sketchy.  But Freddie and his mom, Aunt Millie, they were his family.  Freddie, however, always ran a bit on the wild side, and when he shows up […]

May-July Leftovers

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Tripwire by Jack Reacher

Baby Moll by John Farris

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Boyle

The Laundromat: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich

X by Davey Davis

Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship by Harvey Araton

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham

Ex Machina Book Four by Brian K. Vaughan

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite

Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond

That Kind of Danger by Donna Masini

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Spenser Confidential by Ace Atkins

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I usually do these at the end of the month but then I went through a big reading slump March-May. And then I roared back but realized I was behind. So apologies for this being so long. There Will Be Fire **** A good, readable text on a moment in history I knew little about. Even after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, I still had a lot of problem keeping track of all the socio-political dynamics so it’s good that Rory Carroll makes it accessible […]



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