Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Prisoners of the Self

The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult by Harrison Hill

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CBR18 Bingo: 26 – Published April 7, 2026. Also, Sarah Green escaped her mother’s cult at the age of twenty-six. When Sarah Green escaped the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult, she was running away from not only the violence of the group, but from its leader, her own mother. I came across this book by reading an excerpt in the news – drawn in by the story, I right away went out looking for the book at the library. Most cults […]

Colonies, Cults and Crimes

The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land by Sally Denton

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I have the Harris County Public Library to thank for this recommendation.  Before jumping into The Colony, I have to confess, I wasn’t really aware that the Mormon Church had much of a significant presence in Mexico. But it turns out there a number of prominent  fundamentalist Mormon families have been established there since the US outlawed polygamy in the 1880’s.  The book opens with the 2019 murders of three women and six of their children as they drove through Northern Mexico. While initial reports […]

“When someone describes a man as harmless, he ends up being a villain.”

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

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Dark Corner selection – February 26 Defeat the Goblin – The pebble book – a book that was gifted to you Monthly Keyword 26: Sun Nowhere Book Bingo 26: A book with multiple POVs Read the Rainbow: Black This is a book with a number of different POV characters. There is Serapio, a blind young man whom we first encounter as a child, being horribly mutilated by his mother (who subsequently throws herself off a building). All this horrific violence is to make him a […]

Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam for layfolks

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin

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Every now and again, there’s a picture of David Tenant that pops up on social media where he’s taking a selfie at a con, and there’s some guy just next to him with his nose in his phone. The caption is almost always some suggestion of what the other guy is missing being that close to a celebrity and not knowing it.  Here’s my version of that, kind of. I kind of remember the final time I graduated that the Commencement speaker was referred to […]

The Latter Day Wild West

The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land by Sally Denton

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When a caravan of women and children were ambushed by masked gunmen on a remote Mexican road, it sent political ripples through both Mexico and the United States. But this is not the first time the LeBaron and La Mora communities have been in the headlines. Though this book uses the 2019 killings as the entry point into the story, it more broadly chronicles the history of this particular branch of the fundamentalist Mormon LeBaron family, which is well known for its polygamous practices and […]

And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror? ― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These “What it is to be a man,” she said, […]



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