Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Honestly, I didn’t even know virologist was a word, let alone how bada$$ they can be!

June Almeida, Virus Detective!: The Woman Who Discovered the First Human Coronavirus by Suzanne Slade and Elisa Paganelli

by Leave a Comment

Back in 2021 the book June Almeida, Virus Detective!: The Woman Who Discovered the First Human Coronavirus by Suzanne Slade and illustrator Elisa Paganelli was published. In 2026 I found a copy of it. I then read it. I liked it. And then I wrote a review about it. The theme is simple: woman scientist discovered ways of counteracting viruses, learned to use machines in ways no one had before, and would decades before it would be needed on a global scale, tells us that […]

Nanorrobots Prodigiosos?

Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años by Juan José Gómez Cadenas; Juan Botas

by Leave a Comment

So for my European bingo spot, I’m going to review a science book about humanity’s tangles with viruses that eventually builds to the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años‘ (‘Virus. The war of a billion years’) is a bit of a curiosity for me: this book about viruses, diseases, and pandemics, which was written with a Spanish perspective in mind, was completed during the very first few months of the pandemic. The authors state in the introduction that the writing […]

Too Close to Home

Darwin's Children by Greg Bear

by Leave a Comment

I don’t generally read Mr. Bear’s science fiction novels, but I was at a recent library book sale and picked up this futuristic tale of a generation of mutated children. I was at a disadvantage because I hadn’t read the first novel, Darwin’s Radio, but I plowed ahead anyway. A terrible virus called SHRV has infected many pregnant mothers. Their offspring are smart, tall, and use their freckles to communicate with one another. They also have acute hearing and identify each other by smell. Several […]

I roam around around around around around….

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

by Leave a Comment

For the first third of Wanderers, it seems like this is a fairly straight forward mystery: what is making seemingly healthy, random people rise from their beds and sleepwalk in a group across America? They have no uniting characteristics and no history of sleepwalking. They cannot be stopped or else they heat up and literally explode (it’s as gross as you imagine). They do not eat, defecate, speak, or even blink. Syringes cannot pierce their skin. They move in tandem silently, like a school of […]

Kids can be very scary

We Hear Voices by Evie Green

by Leave a Comment

This book scared the crap out of me. It has the combined terrifying issues of children, murder, mysterious institutions, and other creepy shit. This horror story follows a boy named Billy who has an imaginary friend named Delfy. At first, Delfy seems like a harmless, developmentally approrpriate figment of a young boy’s imagination; but Delfy soon evolves into something malevolent. Something uncany about this book is that it takes place in the future, in a world where a pandemic has swept through the population. Meanwhile, […]

Classic King – not for the faint of heart

by 1 Comment

I adore post-apocalyptic literature and have read many of the Stephen King biggies (The Shining, Misery, Carrie, Pet Cemetary, It, Salem’s Lot, Christine, Needful Things, Thinner) so not sure why I hadn’t read The Stand but I think the size of the volume probably had something to do with it. At 1153 pages The Stand is less a hobby and moreso a lifestyle choice. His fifth book, written in 1978, it was definitely a blast from the past. I snagged the copy held for me at […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo