Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Confusing, but fun

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

by Leave a Comment

Nowhere Book Bingo: Award Winner (Won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1998, plus a bunch of others) Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Scene on a boat or body of water (there’s a lot of rowing on the river) CBR16 Bingo: Tech (time travel requires pretty specific technology) This is the second book in the Oxford Time Travel series, but you really don’t need to have read the first one, Doomsday Book, to understand and enjoy this one. In the universe these books are set in, […]

Rolling Heads

Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

by Leave a Comment

What you must never forget about this one is that you’re still in Wolf Hall. That’s trite, I know! But I can’t think of what else to say because as I reoriented my perspective on reading this, its power really hit me. I read Wolf Hall five years ago, at a different period in my life and thought it was just ok. Appreciated what it was doing but I didn’t have the focus to engage with it like I should have. Time and age tend to confer […]

I Hope It Doesn’t Suck

The Lesser Dead by Christopher Buehlman

by 1 Comment

Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: smash. This book is a vampire novel, a historical fiction novel, and a mystery novel all rolled into one.  Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires isn’t the kind of book I’d normally read: gonzo fantasy. But it came highly recommended and — in spite of itself — it worked. The imagery was overpowering and the narrative eventually caught up with it near the end. It made sense for the kind of story it was trying to tell: take the apocalyptic overtones of […]

Mission Be Funny While Stopping Duncan’s Murder

Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Weird Sisters by Olga Wojtas

by Leave a Comment

Bingo 3: Fanfic Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Weird Sisters is a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; it’s definitely fanfic, both in that it’s a self-insertion into an established world/story and that it’s loaded with basically Easter Eggs that only a fan of the original would appreciate. The premise is that Shona McMonagle is a middle-aged librarian who is somehow capable of time-travel. The time travel thing is not really explained, and it doesn’t really matter as that’s not the point. When Shona was younger, she […]

Campy

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: and also…This is a repeat of the dun-dun square since the book is a mystery Has America found her Tana French? Bold words to be sure. French is my favorite writer and the person I’d argue is our greatest living crime writer. Her character-driven mysteries are sumptuous masterpieces. The Hunter, her 2024 release, is an early favorite for my personal best book of this year. At the very least, I can’t imagine it falling out of the top 3. French […]

This was disappointing

The Witches of Vardø by Anya Bergman

by Leave a Comment

In 1662, a former mistress of the king of Denmark-Norway (Norway was a Danish colony for about 400 years, for those not big into their history trivia), Anna Rhodius is sent into exile to a fortress in Vardø in the very north of Norway. She convinces herself that she has been sent there to help root out witchcraft, and if she does a good job, she will be welcomed back by the king with open arms. Zigri is the young widow of a fisherman, who […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo