Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“History, like America, is always a work in progress, an experiment, an adventure, a journey”.

History Matters by David McCullough

by Leave a Comment

Our curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages- David McCullough This book collects a smattering of speeches, essays, interviews, and reading lists that David McCullough accumulated over the years, some of which have never been published before. Collected by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson, and fellow historical researcher Michael Hall, this really short book (it’s only 176 pages) gives you a good taste of the kind of man McCullough was. And what type of man was David McCullough? A man who understands history. He […]

We not only have faces and names; some of us have extensive bibliographies.

Creep: Accusations and Confessions by Myriam Gurba

by Leave a Comment

I became aware of Myriam Gurba on Twitter when she tweeted about her review of a forthcoming bestseller, American Dirt, being killed because it was too mean. My first thought, being intimately familiar with the liberties white women take with other people’s stuff, was that she was, at a minimum, as mean as she needed to be. (I am a white woman, born and raised in Texas, so when I say I am intimately familiar, I mean it is my heritage.) There is an essay […]

Personal Essays on Horror, from a Queer Angle

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror by Joe Vallese (editor)

by 5 Comments

When I saw that It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror came out this month I headed immediately to my library catalog to request it and then proceeded to consume it over three evenings. By and large this is an excellent collection of essays featuring queer authors of many stripes taking a movie, sometimes two, and either pulling them apart to discuss representation, or explain why they became fixated on a certain film, or how a film can help them process part of […]

Incisive and Interesting Essays on Orthodox Jewish Childhood

Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhood by Dainy Bernstein (editor)

by Leave a Comment

Artifacts of Orthodox Childhoods is a book of personal and critical essays that cover a historically under-researched topic. The book is inclusive of a wide range of viewpoints and backgrounds, and it benefits from the thought that went into the editing of the essays and the impulse to widen instead of narrow the people who contributed. I appreciated that this book didn’t retread the same familiar ground we see in the media of the triumphant escape from the backwards evil of Ultra-Orthodoxy. Instead, the collection gave […]

Crazy New BEST Friend?!

I Want to be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

by 8 Comments

I must start by thanking ASKReviews for letting us all know that there was a SECRET MUSICAL in the middle of this audiobook! I heeded their recommendation to “Get the Audio Version”, and boy howdy am I glad I did! Not only do we get a musical adventure about Rachel Bloom’s desire to be a musical theater STAAAR, the musical is performed by her harmonizing with herself, herself, herself, herself, and maybe another Rachel Bloom or two. Bloom’s voice is so important here; her style, […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo