Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

by 4 Comments

Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

“Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

by 2 Comments

CBR17 Bingo: Review – I first came across Caitlin Doughty and her books through numerous reviewers on Goodreads. Caitlin Doughty had been long fascinated with death, but when she started working at a crematory, she soon found herself more interested in the question of why death in America has become so distant from the general public. I am maybe not the right audience for Doughty’s message about the loss of intimacy and ritual in the American way of death. I am a Hindu, and we […]

90s Pop Culture Drama FTW

Hits, Flops and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick

by Leave a Comment

Recently, a Gwyneth Paltrow biography was published and people were only too happy to revisit and re-examine the old gossip about the friendship breakdown between Paltrow and our 90s queen Winona Ryder. One of the articles referenced an excerpt from Ed Zwick’s memoir. The excerpt was about his struggle to get Shakespeare in Love made, although it was primarily focused on the behind the scenes drama associated with the original cast, focusing on a young Julia Roberts. It all read as very juicy and 90s, […]

Dispatches from the Frontier

Little Pasture on the Prairie by Eliza Blue

by Leave a Comment

CBR17 Bingo: Work – In this book, the author discusses her life and work on her family ranch, where she is a shepherdess, and all the highs and lows of that lifestyle. Author, songwriter, and shepherdess Eliza Blue invites us into her life on her family ranch in South Dakota as told in the highlights from a decade of newspaper columns. I’ve always lived in places that are hilly or places that are green or places that are both hilly and green. I think if […]

You’ve heard of Queen for a Day? This is Duchess for a Month.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

by Leave a Comment

CBR 17 BINGO: School, because Helene has Trinity and Oriel Colleges in Oxford on her must-see list and has a hissy fit when she almost doesn’t get to see them BINGO: School, Diaspora, G, Border, Work One of the surprising benefits of stumbling upon a beautiful, used copy of 84, Charing Cross Road is that it prompted me to read Helene Hanff’s follow-up memoir, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. I hadn’t known this book existed until very recently. Apparently, after 84, Charing Cross Road was […]

Books about books are the best kinds of books

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

by 6 Comments

CBR 17 BINGO: Favorite (revisiting this old favorite for Bingo) BINGO: Favorite, Red, Family, Border, Green Visiting local bookshops is standard practice whenever my husband and I go on vacation. Recently in Vancouver, we wandered into a store called MacLeod’s Books, which is one of those places where you can easily get lost among the piles. Books are roughly organized into genres, but each section is overwhelmed with stacks and stacks of volumes spilling over from the shelves. This is the type of place where […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo