Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

If there’s flying, there’s plot going on

Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett

by Leave a Comment

Bingo 23: Take the skies Telepathy is essentially brainwave communication, wireless and thus air-born communication. Telepathy or shared mental space is also a major factor in Locklands. Also, a good chunk of time is spent is what might be this world’s very first “airplane”. A key thing to know about Locklands is that it is the third of a trilogy, so a lot of the tech/magic references and some critical background plot will not make sense without the first two. There’s been s several year […]

CBR Bingo 15: On the Road

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

by Leave a Comment

This book could fit into several of Bingo categories, and sadly has been banned in some places (usual suspects). Written in 1993 and set in 2025, The Parable of the Sower is a frighteningly plausible story about a world impacted by climate change, political breakdown and economic and social inequity. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is a black teenager who has grown up outside of Los Angeles. Cars are a thing of the past, electricity is scarce and becoming scarcer. There is little rain to grow […]

Gini Koch encouraged me to join the team and ‘touch an alien’, so I did!

Touched by an Alien by Gini Koch

by 3 Comments

CBR Bingo: North America – Touched by an Alien is set in the American Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico. A few years ago I picked up Alexander Outland: Space Pirate by G.J. Koch and it was a blast.  Funny, fast paced, sci-fi adventure.  Afterwards, I looked for more books by the author and discovered she also wrote under Gini Koch and was impressed by the volume of books on the shelf at the bookstore.  As I didn’t know where to start, I got overwhelmed and went […]

WHen zombies may not be just zombies and the body and soul connection is not what anyone seems to think

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

by Leave a Comment

Bingo 9: Strange Worlds Nona the Ninth takes place in an apocalyptic city but there are references to space travel and planets and other not-Earth realms (namely The River, but that might be a little spoiler-y); this novel definitely fits the strange part of Strange Worlds and by the final third or so starts to really get more into the worlds part. Nona seems to be around 12 or so, but really has maybe only existed for about 6 months, at least that’s as far […]

Strange Worlds

The Midnight Library by Matthew Haig

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR15Bingo: strange worlds. The premise of the book is the MC traveling to different lives she lived in different worlds as she exists in a state between life and death. I’m gonna be honest up front: it will be very hard to squeeze 250 words out of me regarding this book. If it wasn’t for the bingo, I’d just slap it on the leftovers. I’ve long considered the concept of living past lives, wondering if things would have been better. I […]

A Woman is a Mule, or “What’s in that trunk, Adelaide?”, or a Novel of Second Chances

Lone Women by Victor LaValle

by 2 Comments

I met Victor LaValle at a literary fest a few years ago. While handing him a copy of The Changeling, which was his latest novel at the time and the book I had just finished reading, I said to him, “I feel like I’m the person you’re writing these books for. You’re writing these books for me.” And I meant it then and I mean it now. There’s a point at which LaValle started writing the books he knew he was meant to write (he has […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo