Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About dsbs42

CBR 3
CBR 4
CBR 5
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR15 Participant

Nerd. Professional student. Eager reader. Reluctant writer. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: dsbs42's Quick Questions interview.)

dsbs42's Reviews:

“F**k you this is hilarious.”

Texts from Jane Eyre by Daniel M. Lavery

by 9 Comments

That ^ is Roxane Gay’s entire review of the Texts from Jane Eyre on Goodreads and it cracked me right up. The book is currently rated an average of 3.61 stars out of 5, so I assume that’s what she’s referring to. Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favourite Literary Characters (and also their authors, just so’s you know), is based on the feature of the same name (the first part of the name) from The Toast. The feature askes: if literary […]

Oh, ever in the greening spring…

The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White

by Leave a Comment

What a charming little book. The Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little movies were big hits with me when I was a kid (in fact, that 1999 Stuart Little movie kickstarted a crush on Hugh Laurie that endures to this day), and so naturally obsessive little completionist dsbs42 needed to read the books those movies were based on. I loved Charlotte’s Web in particular. And at some point many years later, I decided to revisit them as an adult and bought the E. B. White set, whereupon […]

“There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.”

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

by 2 Comments

Sometimes, when I’m enjoying the world of a book, I start reading slowly and lingering over each passage because I don’t want it to end. Piranesi is just over 250 pages, but I savoured it over the course of two weeks. Susanna Clarke is something of a magician herself. I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for its atmosphere, likable and/or vivid characters, and subtle humour, and although Piranesi is a completely different sort of book, I loved it for the same reasons. Every single review I have […]

I know I am, but what are you?

The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

by Leave a Comment

Or the full name: The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too). Yeesh. We all love taking personality quizzes, don’t we? Which Hogwarts house we’d belong to (I’m a Ravenpuff), which is our True Colour (Green/Blue tie), which Friends character we’d be (…Mondler). Or, perhaps slightly more scientifically, our Myers-Briggs profile, or Big Five ratings. When I was in high school, there was one proto-BuzzFeed-type website where you could do all sorts […]

Never Tell Me the Odds

Cypher System Rulebook by Monte Cook

by Leave a Comment

This is one of those reviews where my original write-up got erased when my computer unexpectedly updated and the autosaved version was from the draft of my previous book review, so I’d really like to just type “I WROTE IT ALREADY” with a bunch of crying/angry/head explodey emojis and move on. 🤯😠😡😖😫😭🤬🤬🤬☠     🤬 However, this doesn’t really feel like it should count as a review, so here goes nothing. (I just feel like I’m forgetting so much of what I originally wanted to […]

But did they try more cowbell?

Severance by Ling Ma

by Leave a Comment

In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good/adequate/completed review, I’m just going to try and get my thoughts down about this book. Severance was one of my it’s->$4.99-on-Kindle-so-if-I-have-even-the-vaguest-interest-I-will-buy-it impulse purchases. I read the critics’ reviews on Amazon and friends’ ratings on Goodreads, skimmed the free sample to get a sense of what it was about, and was hooked. Unfortunately, my interest had waned by about the third chapter. Severance, which was written in 2018, takes place in 2011 and […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo