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

by Leave a Comment

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 […]

Magical Thinking Gone Wrong

The Vampire's Cult: The Untold Story of Obsession, Control, and a Shocking Small-Town Murder by Chet Hardin

by Leave a Comment

When Sydney Loofe goes missing after a date with a woman she met online, people fear that she’s met with foul play, but no one can predict the strange long road that brought her killers to the point of her murder. Despite this case having occurred in the past decade, I didn’t have much of a recollection of it going into this book. As such I was the perfect audience to be jerked around by each strange twist and turn as it happened. This is […]

“Luck is an undependable commodity.”

Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Michael P. Ghiglieri, Thomas Myers

by 2 Comments

Two veteran adventurers and employees who worked in the Grand Canyon compile the stories of all the many people who have died in the canyon and the diverse fates which have befallen them. I visited the Grand Canyon about a decade ago, and I remember being struck by the sheer immensity of the landscape, as well as how colorful it was. My family and I just biked along the rim for a few hours, but always took plenty of care to keep away from the […]

“Anybody who spends a lot of time burrowing through primary records of the old South is going to find almost anything they can imagine & more than a little that they never imagined.”

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely

by Leave a Comment

When people think of slavery in the American South, they usually imagine vast, intensely segregated plantations. However, usually Black people and their White enslavers lived cheek by jowl, and this terrible intimacy could give rise to many different kinds of tensions, as demonstrated by the six court cases covered in this book. Most of what I know about slavery in the United States was learned in the long ago days of high school and before, so I chose to pick up this book to both […]

Quilt of love

A Language of Stitches: The Radical Quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins by Constance Moore

by Leave a Comment

When I need a quick read I look through my online reader saves and find all sorts of goodies. One of those was A Language of Stitches: The Radical Quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins by Constance Moore. Read (obviously) via an online reader, this book is due end of July-early August 2026. Rosie Lee Tompkins (born Effie Mae Martin ) reminds me of the artist Sister Mary Corita Kent because of their artistic style. Both were unusual, yet they were products of their time. They both […]

Your Confederate Sympathies May Vary

The Outlaw Hearts by Rebecca Brandewyne

by Leave a Comment

When schoolteacher Jenny Colter takes the train into the little Ozarks town of Tumbling Creek, she’s hoping to leave behind the violence which destroyed her family in post-Civil War Atlanta. But when she catches sight of the uncovered face of Luke Morgan when he’s robbing the train, he’s determined to keep her quiet by any means necessary… Rebecca Brandewyne is another of those writers of big off-the-wall 80s bodice rippers which I love, though her work doesn’t reach for the soaring heights of WTF-ery that […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo