Cannonball Read 11

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Losing His Religion

The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford

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The Black Mass of Brother Springer is a tough book to classify…or even recommend. A biting satire of organized religion, a send up of civil rights through the white gaze, a testimony on the consequences of fragile masculinity. There’s a lot going on here for such a short book. The book’s writer Charles Willeford is one of my favorites. He writes crime novels with a unique voice that’s tough to compare. No less than Quentin Tarantino has said that Willeford is the biggest literary inspiration for his movies and I get it. Though stylistically they’re both quite different, Tarantino uses Willeford’s […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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9/23/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:95 |

Praise the Lord

The Churchgoer by Patrick Coleman

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It’s clear that Patrick Coleman has an axe to grind against evangelical culture. He uses The Churchgoer as an outlet to do so. I’m a Christian and while I’ve always been a mainline Protestant one (translation: a tad more open-minded than many), I’m quite familiar with the evangelical culture Coleman is skewering here. Many of his references and stories brought back flashbacks to my own life. Attendance numbers have steadily declined in these churches for the last decade (reflective of a decline in church attendance amongst all denominations) but in the 90s and aughts, they were cultural powerhouses. The music, the preachers, […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Praise the Lord"

8/24/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:84 |

How to create beauty from chaos.

A Beautiful Mess by Danielle Strickland

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Danielle Strickland is a speaker that I have had the privilege to hear several times, and even learn from directly at a conference she taught at. I’m a huge fan of her as a person, and of the work that she does. She’s passionate about empowering women to lead (especially in the church, where sadly, the patriarchy is still often calling the shots) and she’s passionate about justice (working with girls at risk of falling into human trafficking). She’s real and genuine and is someone I highly respect as a human on this planet. I picked up this wee little […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/13/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:24 |

Great read, unless you’ve heard her speak live.

SelfLess by Megan Marshman

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I picked up this little book after hearing Marshman speak at a conference I was attending. She is an engaging speaker, and was the reason I wanted to attend the conference to begin with. She’s dynamic and hilarious and insightful and real. Just enough sarcasm to be relatable, and full of hilarious anecdotes from her real life to drive home the points she’s making. So I was happy to pick up this book, looking for more of what she has to offer. The book itself is good. Marshman identifies our need to please others, resulting in trying to fill others […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Great read, unless you’ve heard her speak live."

7/12/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:20 |

I’m not really one for archery anyways…

The Last Arrow by Erwin McManus

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Welp, before I jump into a bingo card, I should PROBABLY get caught up on my review backlog. <sigh> Here we go! I initially heard McManus at a conference, and he is a powerful and dynamic speaker. Then a couple friends suggested this as a book club option. I had read (and enjoyed) a couple of his other books, but this one fell a bit flat for me. The basic premise is to encourage people to not give up on their dreams, passions, and goals. Don’t settle for a generic, bland life – you could be travelling the world, having […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/11/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:7 |

“Get it, Fred? I’m holey!”

Black December by Scott Hunter

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DCI Brendan Moran, still recovering from a severe car accident the year before, is called out to a Catholic boarding school named Charnford Abbey, where one of the monks has been murdered (I accidentally typed ‘monkeys’ instead of ‘monks’ here, which would have been better). The abbot and other monks seem strangely uncooperative. Soon, another body is found, unravelling the ancient secrets of the closed order and blah blah blah. The story also includes narcolepsy, a group of cunning Romanian squatters, a long-lost love lost to an IRA car bomb, a formerly brilliant surgeon lost to alcoholism, a famous relic, […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/11/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:19 |

Probably more my fault than the book….

The Book of English Magic by Richard Heygate, Philip Carr-Gomm

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The Book of English Magic turned out to have two very special magic powers: It made me realise that I’m nowhere near as open-minded as I think I am, and It managed to make one minute of reading fell like ten years of slogging through swampland Let me explain… Despite not being at all spiritual or religious myself, I do enjoy reading about the beliefs that some people hold as a way of trying to better understand them. Whilst I’ve often then arrived at some kind of understanding, in the same way that I would understand a story, I still […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Probably more my fault than the book…."

5/26/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:14 |

Will this be a review of this book or a review of my Episcopalian conversion? Stay tuned.

Jesus Was An Episcopalian (And You Can Be One Too!) by Rev. Chris Yaw

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There’s a lot to unpack here and most of it really isn’t about this book. I was raised Lutheran and turned out queer, which took me down Agnostic Avenue. I was also born and raised with an unfortunate penchant for self-loathing and perfectionism and never lost a deep-down belief in some kind of God. Enter a great big beautiful holy corrupt institutional enabler: the Catholic Church. And that’s how I became a queer adult convert to Catholicism. I felt something in the church I’d never felt before – holiness and a truth that could not be ignored. It took my […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Will this be a review of this book or a review of my Episcopalian conversion? Stay tuned."

4/18/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:11 |


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