Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Not Quite “Wonder”ful

A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney

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Bingo Update: This is for Not My Wheelhouse. I love fantasy, but I tend to skip Urban Fantasy. I read this specifically to challenge that about myself. Bonus Note: I won a free copy of this from a contest on GoodReads, courtesy of Fierce Reads. A quick summary with no spoilers. A Blade So Black is a contemporary reimagining of the Alice in Wonderland story. Sort of. Set in present day Atlanta, our heroine is Alice, this time portrayed by a badass black teen with […]

I’m as shocked as anyone that I love a book about trees!

Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori

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CBR11bingo: Not My Wheelhouse BINGO, diagonally: Cannonballer Says, Not My Wheelhouse, Own Voices, Illustrated, Reading the TBR I may have been called a tree hugger in my day, but botany has never been my area. I can enjoy plants from a purely aesthetic point of view, but reading an entire book dedicated to trees? For my tree fix, I’d prefer to turn to Joyce Kilmer’s 12-line poem and call it a day. But Jonathan Drori’s Around the World in 80 Trees. . . I’m speechless! This […]

REALLY Not My Wheelhouse

The Maze at Windemere by Gregory Blake Smith

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My boss loves having me read whatever his classes are reading so he can talk about the books with someone who’s not a student, and The Maze at Windemere ended up on my desk after he taught his Gilded Age course. We have vastly divergent tastes in books, but most of the time he’s pretty good at nailing what we’ll both enjoy…… This was not one of those times. I didn’t really know what to expect from this book, and after finishing it, I’m still […]

In a Galaxy Far Far Away

Burning Chrome by William Gibson

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William Gibson’s Burning Chrome is a collection of 12 science fiction short stories that were written in the late 70s and early 80s and have been published together.  I would almost certainly never have picked up this book on my own- it joined my book collection after being abandoned by an old roommate, who had herself picked it for a college Science Fiction Literature class (which hints at how long this book has been knocking around my apartment).  Despite this not being my usual jam, […]

Drugs and Other Unreliable Narrators

Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson

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I read this with my mentor for our Advanced Fiction course, and it’s definitely far outside my wheelhouse in both content and structure. Johnson’s story follows an unnamed addict through a series of short snippets told out of order chronicling his cycle of addiction and rehabilitation. Johnson’s choice to tell this story out of order worked very well, as we get to see all the different facets of the narrator regardless of where he is in his habits, or what he’s doing.  All the narration […]

The ten-dollar Founding Father without a father

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

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My first CBR 10 Bingo entry: Not my wheelhouse! I don’t read much history and I don’t read many biographies; an historical biography might be an actual first for me. I confess, I was swept away by the Hamilton Mania triggered by Lin-Manual Miranda’s fabulous musical about the founding father who grew up an orphan, immigrated to America, fought in the American Revolution, started the First Bank of the United States, and died as a result of a gunshot wound administered by Aaron Burr. Let’s […]



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