Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Dispatches from the Frontier

Little Pasture on the Prairie by Eliza Blue

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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

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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

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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 […]

This memoir legitimately deserves 5 stars, but I’m too angry to give it a rating yet

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

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CBR 17 BINGO: “G” (for Glass) Back in 2019, I recommended Educated to my sister. After she read and enjoyed (not sure that’s the right word) it , she asked me whether I’d ever read The Glass Castle. “In some ways, it’s worse,” she told me. I finally got around to reading The Glass Castle, and I understand now where she was coming from. While Tara Westover’s parents were consistently ignorant and controlling, the parents of Jeanette Walls were people of dichotomy. Her father was […]

The Word ‘Turbulent’ Is Bearing a Lot of Weight Here

Bomb Season in Jakarta: A personal account of a turbulent period in Australian diplomacy by Grant Dooley

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This is yet another book I’ve discovered via listening to ABC’s Conversations.  The subtitle of Bomb Season in Jakarta is A personal account of a turbulent period in Australian diplomacy, and Grant Dooley is not kidding when he writes this. Back in 2004, Dooley and his family had moved to Indonesia to start a three year stint working at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. This was a few years after the 1999 East Timorese crisis and only two years after the 2002 Bali Bombings, Indonesia’s […]

This one is wonderful.

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre

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The problem, for me, when trying to finish a whole Cannonball, is that I read a lot of very long books that take me a long time to finish, and then I spend a week in a book coma, and then it’s July. So around August/September, I think oh shoot this is not going to work, and then I find a ton of random novellas so that I can reach my goal. The choice of these shorter books is based solely on feasibility (length). Sometimes […]



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