Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

I might have posted about this book before, but I can’t help it! I keep reading and liking it.

Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices by Walter Dean Myers

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Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices by Walter Dean Myers Read it! It’s terribly cool! Yes, that is a short, not completely grammatically solid comment, but it is how I feel about Here in Harlem. I could ramble on about how the poems are dealing with the life and death of the people of Harlem, so some themes are mature. And I could say that each voice is fun and unique and clever and sad, and beautiful and even though sometimes we are listening […]

Dietrich in Harlem

Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance by Reggie L. Williams

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer is widely celebrated by mainline Protestant (mostly white) Christians because he’s one of the rare public instances in which a white Christian has been on the right side of history. In standing up to the Nazis, Bonhoeffer is considered a modern day martyr. But what’s not as publicly known is that Bonhoeffer found the strength to resist the Nazis during his time in Harlem. Studying at General Theological Seminary, located in nearby Morningside Heights, Bonhoeffer worked in the famous Abyssinian Baptist Church. It […]

Gorgeous

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams

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Tia Williams has just made me like a fated lovers romance. Not like. Love. Lovers who are destined for each other is one of my least favorite tropes, but WIlliams makes this work for me. She throws in the right mix of magic and logic, and gives us achingly human characters. Now is the perfect time to read this. A lot of the action takes place in February 2024. Williams grounds her magic in the leap year, almost making me believe in the magic of […]

Sigh…Vampires

No Dominion by Charlie Huston

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On Goodreads, there is a reviewer named Kemper (an alias). He has since retired, which is a shame because I love his reviews. He enjoys a lot of the same crime fiction I do. Anyway, Kemper had this tic I once found annoying in that he would write reviews by doing faux interviews with the authors of the books he read. He usually did this when he read something that wasn’t so good. I preferred reading his regular reviews. However, as I’ve written so many […]

A multi-generational exploration of Black experience from the early days of the slave trade through modern day.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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CBR 15 Bingo: Africa – The book begins, ends, and half of it takes place in Africa. Yaa Gyasi begins Homegoing with a pair of sisters (Effia Otcher and Esi Asare) separated at birth at the height of the African slave trade.  One sister, Effia, is raised and married off to a white Englishman on the Gold Coast.  The other sister, Esi, stays in a tribal African village.  The story covers seven generations. Each chapter is a new person advancing down the timeline and alternates between […]

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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