Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A hodgepodge of Italians, Poles, Syrians, Lebanese, Greeks and the occasional bearded Amish family…

New Castle's Kadunce Murders: Mystery and the Devil in Northwest Pennsylvania by Dale Richard Perelman

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CBRBINGO13: Home Square (BINGO! The Wilds square to Book Club square) I think this close to Halloween, it’s fitting that I picked a book about a murder in my hometown that haunted my middle school dreams. New Castle is a small rust belt town about an hour and 1/2 northwest of Pittsburgh. By the time I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, most of the city was already in decline as local industry and jobs dried up. It wasn’t a bad place to […]

Two Entirely Different Kinds of Pirates

Pirate Queen: A Story of Zheng Yi Sao by Helaine Becker, Ill. Liz Wong

What Isabella Wanted: Isabella Stewart Gardner Builds a Museum by Candace Fleming Ill. Matthew Cordell

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But Fortune cares nothing for your dreams. She takes up your life in her cup and shakes it so hard your teeth rattle in your head and your heart roars like a dragon in your chest. Then she throws the bones onto her table of lacquer and jade. Your fate is sealed. – Helaine Becker, Pirate Queen: A Story of Zheng Yi Sao Did I know much about Zheng Yi Sao before I read this? Only that she existed, reigned over the South China Sea […]

A book that actually made me start exercising again, despite (or possibly because of) the name

Jeg hater å trene (I hate to exercise) by Brita Zackari

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Brita Zackari is a Swedish ex-model, TV presenter, and the writer of this book – about how she absolutely and utterly hates exercising, how she first started dieting before she was ten, and how diets are the absolute worst thing you can do to your body, but the patriarchy and modern society pretty much brainwash us into thinking we need to be thinner and fitter and that diets are a way to achieve that. As she says in the book, female bodies very rarely get […]

One Day in February

The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire by Chloe Hooper

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Australia gets a lot of coverage overseas when it comes to our devastating bushfires. The collective bushfires of January 2020 were especially notable for their sense of apocalypse. But as horrific as the 2020 fires were, the summer of 2009 was even more deadly. February 7 was a particularly devastating day for my home state of Victoria; known as ‘Black Saturday,’ the extreme weather conditions helped fan the flames of over 400 individual fires, killing 173 people, and impacting many, many more. I had friends […]

A Pandemic Diary and a Chronicle of Grief

This Will All Be Over Soon: A Memoir by Cecily Strong

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Cbr13bingo Fauna, Bingo #1 (Flora to Fauna) I’m on a roll with memoirs, this being my third in a row. Cecily Strong of SNL fame spent 2020 the way many of us did — holed up at home trying to get through the early stages of the pandemic. She and a couple of friends left NYC for a house rental in a more remote area of New York where she struggled with fear of the virus and the loss of people close to her. Yet […]

This will be one of my CBR13 favorites

Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story; Remaking a Life From Scratch by Erin French

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Cbr13bingo Flora I would guess that fewer than 5% of the book reviews I’ve done over the years have been non-fiction, and I can only think of one that had anything to do with cooking, so reading a memoir about a chef (even though she calls herself a cook, not a chef) would seem way outside my area of interest. And yet, this memoir is probably going to be one of my CBR13 favorites. It is an incredible story of resilience in the face of […]



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