Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I need more stars

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

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Trigger Warning for abuse, violence, depression, suicidal thoughts, drug abuse, addiction I’ve had a copy of this book for years, knowing from its blurb and from what I’ve read about it that I would probably love it, but at 960 pages, it’s a brick and a bit intimidating to start. I finally decided to tackle it, and I finished it in less than a week. I would have finished within days if not for the pesky need for sleep and doing laundry and the like. […]

“ He left you the fortune, Avery, and all he left us is you.”

The Inheritance Games: A Novel by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

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Cbr16bingo Games, Bingo Blackout This book is the start of a YA series that promises to be fun to follow. The main characters are mostly teens, mostly very wealthy, and all involved in a strange and dangerous game that seems to have been contrived by Tobias Hawthorne. Hawthorne was a billionaire who was fond of games and inventions. He loved puzzles and riddles, and constantly challenged his grandsons to match wits with him. Tobias has died, and his two daughters and four grandsons expect to […]

The realness of the story is what makes it so terrifying

Tell Me What I Am: A Novel by Una Mannion

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Cbr16bingo Golden, +2 bingos This novel won the Crime Writer Association’s 2024 Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. It is a riveting, disturbing and heartbreaking story that I didn’t want to put down. At the center of it is the disappearance of Deena Garvey and its impact on her daughter Ruby and sister Nessa. Una Mannion takes us back to the events leading up to Deena’s disappearance and then forward some 15 years later where the reverberations of this traumatic event […]

“…all you can truly say of any historical event … is that ‘something happened.’”

The Sense of an Ending: A Novel by Julian Barnes

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Cbr16bingo Free Spot (sub for Rings square), +3 bingos The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel that won the Booker Prize. It is short but manages to delve into deep themes regarding memory, history and remorse through a story with a surprising finish. Told in two parts by the same narrator, Tony Webster, the reader must constantly question Tony’s memory and reliability, as he himself does. Part 1 of the novel finds Tony as a teenager in the 1960s with his friends in […]

The TV Series is Better

The Umbrella Academy Vol.1: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.2: Dallas by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.3: Hotel Oblivion by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

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Cbr16bingo Earth Day, bingo I really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy series on Netflix and just did a binge of the first three seasons before watching the fourth and final season. Overall, I thought it was excellent. The resolution to the series was great and made sense of a lot of stuff that had been unresolved. I knew it was based on a graphic novel series and decided to pick it up and see how the the TV series compares to the original, and surprisingly for […]

FOMO/YOLO, MOFO!

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

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Cbr16bingo Tech I only picked this up in order to fill the Tech square on my bingo card. It’s not the kind of book I would have looked at otherwise — nonfiction with an emphasis on military flights and the space program? Ugh, no thanks. But in Tom Wolfe’s hands, the topic does become more interesting and readable. The book started as an article for Rolling Stone Magazine about that certain quality that the men involved in the early days of the space program seemed to […]



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