Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Love, Actually is not a good movie

Shit, Actually by Lindy West

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I found Shit, Actually by Lindy West on my trusty and much anticipated NPR’s Best Books of 2020 List. It looked like a fun, entertaining read with a little feminist twist, so I was happy to pick it up. Shit, Actually is a book filled with short essays. Each essay is a pithy review of a well-known movie. Actually, it’s less of review than it is a rehashing of the movie with commentary. It reminded me of CinemaSins, a Youtube channel that I find very entertaining (especially when I need to […]

It’s good, but it made me cringe

Luster by Raven Leilani

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I was very excited to see Barack Obama’s reading list come out at the end of 2020, and I immediately added some of his recommendations to my reading list. One of these was Luster (2020) by Raven Leilani. It wasn’t just Barack Obama who noticed this one: Luster was also on the best books list of NPR, Oprah, and many others. Edie is a young, black woman in her 20’s. She lives in Brooklyn and does administrative work at a production company. Her mother killed herself and her father […]

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”

Just Kids by Patti Smith

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CBR Bingo: Music (and my second Bingo!) Just Kids (2010) by Patti Smith is another book I found and decided to read because of Cannonball Bingo. I’m sure I could have found a number of books that worked for the Music square, but I wanted to read something that made it worth it. I saw that Just Kids had won the National Book Award and I was intrigued. I don’t think I’m the target reader for this book. My knowledge of musicians and artists is limited at best, […]

The mafia and romance?

Violet by Sophie Lark

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I found Violet (2019) by Sophie Lark with a little Google and Amazon searching. I was specifically looking for a book that filled the “Violet” square for Cannonball Bingo, and I figured there had to be a romance novel with ‘violet’ in the title. When I found Violet and saw that I could get it through Kindle Unlimited, I was sold. Violet is the third book in a series (about different mafia romances?), but the description said it was a stand-alone novel, which was perfect for me. Spoilers. Violet is a […]

Good and fun historical romance

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

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Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore was a historical romance novel that I first saw on NPR’s Best Books of 2019. I’ve found some fun and different romance novels on this list, and I was happy to try another. And I liked this book. This was one of my favorite romance novels in awhile. It definitely fulfilled all historical romance expectations, but the female characters felt a little more realistic for their time. They weren’t simply women transplanted from the 21st century back in […]

It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

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CBR12 Bingo: No Money! I discovered Three Women by Lisa Taddeo like many of my books–on NPR’s Best Books of 2019. I decided to use it to fill my No Money! bingo square. This was by far the easiest square for me to get. I get almost all of the books I read from the library, so most of the books I’ve read this year would work. Three Women is an apt description for this non-fiction account of the sex lives of three women. Their stories vary dramatically, but […]



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