Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Hack Your Way Out of Your Troubles

Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James

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CBR18 Bingo: Repair – The axe is a tool used to fix a lot of things – houses, sheds, ships.  In this book, it can provide a murderous solution to people’s problems too. The phrase ‘axe murder’ conjures images of a brutal, gruesome, and somewhat old-fashioned crime. The history of the axe murder is much longer than its presence in newspapers though, and more intimately intertwined with the lives of its perpetuators and its victims than one might think. Firstly, Whack Job is a truly excellent […]

Get Off My Island!

Eden Undone by Abbott Kahler

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CBR18 Bingo: Sheep – The doctor and Dore, and later the Wittmers, all come to Floreana hoping to live simpler, more rustic lives, growing their own food and tending to their own animals. When Friedrich, a German doctor, and his former patient and lover Dore decide to move to an uninhabited Galapagos island in search of a pastoral setting for their self-improvement, they did not know the publicity and violence that would follow. I had a vague recollection of this bizarre story from hearing about […]

At least now I know where the term “Whirling Dervish” comes from

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

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That’s the most positive thing I can come up with about this book. What a slog this was.  The plot: Ella Rubinstein is a forty year old stay at home mother to two children and a possibly perpetually unfaithful husband. She takes up a job with a publishing house to revise a novel called Sweet Blasphemy by a man named Aziz Zahara. As she reads the novel, she becomes fascinated by the story of the novel, about the friendship between renowned 13th century poet Rumi […]

The Audacity of Princes

The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone

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Joanna I, Queen of Naples, is best known today for having stood trial for the murder of her husband during the height of the bubonic plague, but she faced many other challenges during her thirty-year-long reign. The whole time I was listening to this audiobook, I kept marveling at the absolute audacity of the royal men of this era, who over the decades launched a number of invasions and plots in an attempt to claim Naples for themselves. A woman on the throne seemed to […]

Colonies, Cults and Crimes

The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land by Sally Denton

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I have the Harris County Public Library to thank for this recommendation.  Before jumping into The Colony, I have to confess, I wasn’t really aware that the Mormon Church had much of a significant presence in Mexico. But it turns out there a number of prominent  fundamentalist Mormon families have been established there since the US outlawed polygamy in the 1880’s.  The book opens with the 2019 murders of three women and six of their children as they drove through Northern Mexico. While initial reports […]

“Luck is an undependable commodity.”

Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Michael P. Ghiglieri, Thomas Myers

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Two veteran adventurers and employees who worked in the Grand Canyon compile the stories of all the many people who have died in the canyon and the diverse fates which have befallen them. I visited the Grand Canyon about a decade ago, and I remember being struck by the sheer immensity of the landscape, as well as how colorful it was. My family and I just biked along the rim for a few hours, but always took plenty of care to keep away from the […]



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