Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“She felt she was a bottomless pit of memories, and she was only fifteen. What on earth must it be like when you reached the Duchy’s age? You’d hardly be able to think at all for them; it would be like having so much furniture in a room that there was nowhere left to move.”

Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard

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CBR18 Bingo: Season – The Cazalets are coming into a new season of their lives with the war on, the youngest son Rupert away in France, and new members of the family being born while others are dying. World War Two is now on, and come crashing into the lives of the Cazalets, a clan of well-off English wood dealers. However, they still have their own domestic dramas to deal with closer at home. This is the second book in the Cazalet Chronicles- I read the […]

Probably should not have read this on a diving trip, but still glad I read it.

Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

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The second of my non-fiction journey of 2026. This is an engrossing true story of a group of divers who discovered and identified a lost Nazi submarine of the coast of New Jersey in 1991. The story starts by setting the scene – to be a wreck diver (!) in 1980s (!) New Jersey (!) took a special kind of bravado, and the cast of characters has that in spades. The diving scene was full of hard drinkers, turf wars, and daring, sometimes knuckleheaded, quests. […]

Everyday Jewish Lives Divided by Time

Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World by Jane Ziegelman

Matzah Ball Blues by Jennifer Wilck

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I did not mean to make it a Jewish double feature, but I just happened to read these books around the same time, and it was interesting to see the same traditions discussed in a historical context and then in an average middle-class family from New Jersey. Once There Was a Town by Jane Ziegelman – 3 stars After the Holocaust, since entire shtetls had been reduced to just a handful of survivors, people across continents came together to put together yizkor books to record […]

The Calm Before the Storm

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

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For two summers the Cazalets – grandparents, three sons and their wives, and their numerous children – gathered in their family country home. Caught up in their domestic dramas, they take little notice of the encroaching threat of war – at first. This is the first of the five Cazalet Chronicles, a series which, drawing upon the experiences of the author and her own family, follows wealthy English family in trade through the turbulent years of World War 2 and its aftermath. Being the first […]

“His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.”

Hiroshima by John Hersey

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Originally a long-form article written in 1946, this is the story of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with a follow up from decades on documenting the ups and downs of the survivors’ lives. This far on from the event, the enormity of the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is commonly known, even if it’s still playing out even today. As such it’s rather hard to fully understand how much of a sensation this book was at the time […]

“Every war is a war against the child.”

The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear

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CBR17 Bingo: White – Behold, the cover. Also, a bonus! The title. Elinor is a veteran of two world wars and a trained killer, but all she wants now is to retreat into a peaceful, solitary existence in the English countryside. But when a violent past comes back to haunt her neighbors, she cannot help but become drawn in. I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to checking out Winspear’s long-running Maisie Dobbs series, but in the meanwhile I figured I’d pick up the standalone The […]



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