Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Prisoners of the Self

The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult by Harrison Hill

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CBR18 Bingo: 26 – Published April 7, 2026. Also, Sarah Green escaped her mother’s cult at the age of twenty-six. When Sarah Green escaped the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult, she was running away from not only the violence of the group, but from its leader, her own mother. I came across this book by reading an excerpt in the news – drawn in by the story, I right away went out looking for the book at the library. Most cults […]

“The chief wrong which false prophets do to their following is not financial… but the real harm is on the mental and spiritual plane.”

Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile

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CBR17 Bingo: Borrow – Support your local library! Like many of my reads, I borrowed this book from my local public library. The story of cult leader Amy Carlson and Love Has Won burst onto the news due to the unusual circumstances surrounding her dead, but she and her group are just the latest incarnation of New Age new religious movements in the United States. I have a bit of a fascination with new religious movements (which are not always cults, though all cults are […]

Two Writers

We Are Watching by Alison Gaylin

Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

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I finished two books this past week and enjoyed them to varying degrees. One was by a favorite author, another by an author I’ve struggled with in the past. Let’s get to the latter first since I like going in reading order… We Are Watching**** I’ve always felt cold toward Alison Gaylin’s work. She’s a very good writer and yet, there’s an emotional distance in her books that I can’t land with. It’s the same issue I get when watching most Christopher Nolan movies: yeah […]

I am exhausted.

Bunny by Mona Awad

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I watch them tug at him with a fury that no doubt they put into their graduate school applications. An endlessly entitled fury that will drive them toward the shiny pretty things of this world and not stop until they have claimed them. ― Mona Awad, Bunny CBR16 Bingo: Rage I did not finish this book. I enjoy complicated, messy, unlikeable characters. But the only person I could stand was the poet whom everyone ostracized. Maybe that was the point all along. Samantha Mackey (Smackie) […]

“It took a tremendous effort for me not to rip his arm off, and I’d like that noted for the record, please.”

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1) by Martha Wells

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Back in November of 2018 I joined the cult of Murderbot. After I had read and loved The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers Emmalita and narfna had told me that Murderbot needed to be next up in my reading of contemplative, character driven space opera. I was immediately in love. I’ve kept up with the furthering adventures of Murderbot in the intervening years and had decided earlier this year that I wanted to do a full series re-read before I […]

Life on a Cult TV Show – While Also in an Actual Cult!

Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz

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CBR16 Bingo: Rings – A lot of people get married in this book – at least four couples, including the author Lenz to the cult leader’s son. Bethany Joy Lenz is famous for playing Haley James Scott in the cult TV show One Tree Hill, but her experience of this time is even stranger than one would expect – she was in an actual cult at the time. I never watched One Tree Hill, but with a premise like that, who cares? Besides, TV show […]



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