Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.”

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

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CBR18 Bingo: Summer – The book is set in the heat of Jamaica and the Caribbean Sea, where there is an endless summer. After a hurricane wrecks their home, the Bas-Thornton children and their neighbors, the Fernandez children, are sent off on a ship to England. When they are intercepted by pirates, their lives take an abrupt turn – but whether it is the children or the pirates who will cause the most harm remains to be seen. The cover image for the edition of A […]

One of the fruits of emancipation of the West Indian islands is the number of ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone’s throw of them…

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

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One of those books that is always on everyone’s best of the 20th century list and I’ve never met anyone who’s ever read it or heard of it. I read another of Richard Hughes’s books In Hazard previously about a ship wrecked in a storm, and really didn’t like it. This book is much more enjoyable and I think obviously a much better book. We begin on Jamaica in the 1870s and an English family is living their quaint little racist colonial life when a terrible […]

I’d been demoted and was shoveling slide-back and minding my own business when they found Dwayne Mays’s body in a pile of gob.

Down Don't Bother Me by Jason Miller

Mr Blandings Builds his Dream House by Eric Hodgins

Growing Up by Russell Baker

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous

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Down Don’t Bother Me – 3/5 Stars This is a short gritty Illinois coal country noir novel. I picked it up because I follow the author online but only know him through his relatively insightful and mostly very angry response to the garbage world we all live in. When I was able to grab a copy of his book I did. The novel takes place in southern Illinois in those kinds of rural spaces where there’s a lot of open land, little townlets, and in […]



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