Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search

We’re all just animals after all

Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

by Leave a Comment

Bingo Square: Rec’d (Colormeloverly raved about this novel repeatedly last year on IG) Definitely not my usual kind of novel nowadays – I don’t venture into literary fiction all too often anymore but if they were all like this, I might. Shortly after their wedding, Lewis notices some odd changes in his body, and after consultation, he is diagnosed with an animal mutation: he is transforming into a great white shark, and has less than a year before his transformation will be complete and he […]

“Life was very different when you walked through it.”

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

by 1 Comment

CBR17 Bingo: Green – Behold, the cover! Recently-retired Harold receives a note from his friend Queenie, who he has not seen in twenty years, to inform him that she is dying, and sets out to walk the length of England to go and see her, in the belief that as long as he walks she will not die. This is a pilgrimage across England, but internally it is also a pilgrimage of Harold’s self, in which he comes to terms with the many things that […]

“The economy’s in ruins, no one’s got a job, and we just don’t care, it’s bliss.”

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

by 1 Comment

It’s 1983. Thatcher is at No. 10 and Nick Guest, age 21, has just graduated from Oxford University. He finds himself as a lodger at the house of a college friend, Toby, whose father Gerald Fedden has been elected as a promising new conservative MP. Nick, who comes from a solidly middle class background, finds himself a loose thread intricately woven into the upper class social fabric of the Freddens. Nick has the wrong background and the wrong predilections, and he knows it doesn’t take […]

Around the World Around the World

Night Prayers by Santiago Gamboa

by Leave a Comment

Very mixed feelings on Night Prayers. Ultimately, it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2025. It’s also one of the more frustrating. Gamboa writes in the style of his Latin American contemporaries such as Bolaño and Marquez. And for the most part, he does it well. This is a style I always enjoy sampling, even if it can frustrate me at times with its tangents and magic realism. I quit the book several times in the beginning but was inexorably drawn back to it and […]

Beautiful, Emotional, and Sadly Still Relevant

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

by 1 Comment

This book is beautiful and sad and infuriating, especially in that it is still so relevant 50 years after it was written. It was a hard book to read at times but so well-done and worth it. I was hooked on the story of 19-year-old Tish, who is pregnant and engaged to Fonny—who is in jail awaiting trial for a violent crime he didn’t commit. As one might expect from Baldwin, there is a lot of focus on racism, sexism, and racial injustice, especially within […]

“The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

by Leave a Comment

In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, more than 7000 Athenian prisoners of war are left to rot in Syracuse’s quarries – except a select few whom unemployed Syracusan potters Lampo and Gelon decide will be perfect to mount a pair of plays by the great tragic playwright Euripides. You might have to reread that premise. It’s a pretty whacky one, though some mild trawling of Wikipedia later revealed to me that allegedly some Athenian prisoners in Sicily did buy their freedom by reciting Euripides […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo