Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Violating the Status Quo

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema by Anne Helen Petersen

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CBR 15 Bingo – Dwelling: All the people discussed in this book work and live in Hollywood – both town and concept – which for better or for worse casts a long shadow across their lives. Hollywood has always banked on its stars and their stories as a promotional tool, so heavily that when actors openly diverge from their public personas it often causes backlash among the public. Especially in the first half-century of Hollywood, stars were marketed with particular stories and personas, often as […]

“Kim was starlight and privilege; Will had his feet firmly fixed in the mud. They didn’t belong together. Except they did.”

Subtle Blood by K.J. Charles

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CBR14 Bingo: Scandal (the book features corruption, blackmail, kidnapping, and murder – not to mention gay people in the 1920s. Gasp!) Spoiler warning! This is the third book in a trilogy. While you can absolutely read this book without the others, you will not get all the beautiful payoff from various earlier storylines that way. Also, this review will contain mild spoilers for earlier in the series. Start with Slippery Creatures. For the last few months, Lord Arthur “Kim” Secretan and Will Darling have actually […]

“I don’t think I’ll have anywhere left to hide my excuses and these bright, urgent feelings once his gentle light illuminates each of my dark corners.”

Scandalized by Ivy Owens

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Last month I read Dome’Loki’s review of Scandalized and immediately requested it from my library, which meant I joined a several week long queue. As promised in the review, this story pulls you in immediately. When it finally got to me it took me less than 36 hours to read it (I almost finished it in less than 12, but at 75% I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer and I was required to go to work on Monday – nonsense I tell […]

One Bad Day

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

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Cbr14bingo Scandal/bingo  Published in 1988 generated controversy for its violence, treatment of Barbara Gordon, Moore’s later criticism of his own. See this story in the Guardian. Batman: The Killing Joke, published in 1988, has had enormous influence on Batman movies and seems to be the generally accepted version of the Joker’s origin story. While I haven’t seen all of the Batman movies, as I read this graphic novel, I recognized that Hollywood has largely adopted Alan Moore’s story as canon. Moore himself in subsequent years […]

Quick breezy thriller

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

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Hannah is a newly married thirty-something year old, still smitten with her husband Owen, and largely loving their life in the Sam Francisco Bay Area. They live on a houseboat in Sausalito and she spends her days making hand turned custom wooden furniture while Owen works for an up and coming tech start up in the city where he is the right hand to the CEO. The only friction is between Hannah and Bailey, Owen’s daughter from a previous marriage, who has yet to warm […]

They’re Out!

Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series by Eliot Asinof

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Read as part of CBR14Bingo: Scandal. The 1919 World Series was scandalized by eight members of the Chicago White Sox agreeing to throw it as part of a gambling conspiracy.  Bill James is a legend among baseball fans. His greatest rep is as the Analytics Guy but my first taste of his work was his text on the Hall of Fame, in which he critiques the process by which people enter. James devoted a chapter to baseball’s most famous banned people: Pete Rose and Shoeless […]



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