Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

a very special episode in a very farcical town

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

by Leave a Comment

*”Yakkety Sax” blares through your speakers* A robbery- wait, but not quite. A bank robber, but not who you expect. An accidental hostage situation. Aggressively unhelpful witnesses. A nervous eater who devours a whole lime, pith and all. Bumbling cops. Feisty old ladies. Sounds fun, yes? It is fun! There is a solid farce at the core of this story. Misunderstandings, misdirection, and missed connections fly in and out of quickly slamming doors. A manically wound player piano would not be out of place in […]

Surprised by an oldie

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

by Leave a Comment

[Read as an audiobook from the public library] I hesitated to add this one because it’s just so old, but I honestly enjoyed it when I listened to it in January and it kicked off a good fit of audiobook consumption so I thought, might as well. My real introduction to Agatha Christie came with Phoebe Judge’s Phoebe Reads a Mystery podcast, when she read The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I have a collection of Christie mysteries knocking around the house somewhere, but I could […]

Poetry-writing AIs and Misfit Humans

The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

by Leave a Comment

I have a thing for snarky AIs, and once I saw this was narrated by Nathan Fillion, of course I requested this audiobook. “I’m surrounded by idiots.” Amber Rose – called OC by his crew – is a snarky AI who used to be human. He’s a Buddhist who writes poems in his spare time (absolutely awful poems, by the way) and he’s slowly working his way up the rank of AIs. His latest mission is to oversee the salvage of a UN colony ship […]

“Bind your fate to mine”

Lore by Alexandra Bracken

by Leave a Comment

Official book description: Every seven years, the Agon begins. As punishment for a past rebellion, nine Greek gods are forced to walk the earth as mortals, hunted by the descendants of ancient bloodlines, all eager to kill a god and seize their divine power and immortality.   Long ago, Lore Perseous fled that brutal world in the wake of her family’s sadistic murder by a rival line, turning her back on the hunt’s promises of eternal glory. For years she’s pushed away any thought of […]

the only Scream sequel I need

The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones

by Leave a Comment

Take the meta-horror-commentary of Scream and dial it up to eleven; there at the top of the stairs, silhouetted in moonlight and brandishing a rusty machete, you will find The Last Final Girl. Stephen Graham Jones is leaning hard into the tropes of teen slasher movies, and if you aren’t in on the joke it will fly over your freshly-severed-by-garage-door-head. The story is presented almost as a film treatment; close ups, pans, POVS, and audience responses are all written in and used with cheeky abandon. […]

Half-Cannonball with Murderbot (and FRIENDS!)

Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries #5) by Martha Wells

by 3 Comments

Forgive the late Valentine, but Tor posted this last week and I forgot about it until RIGHT NOW. Oops! The best thing about finishing this book (of course I did not want it to end!) is that now I can read all of the CBR reviews. Hooray! I had to stop myself from peeking at your reviews before I even started listening to Network Effect– the temptation was strong! Now I can continue to bask in the Murderbot blow despite having no new adventures to […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo