Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

Gold Rush

Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman

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The perfect lead-in to this weekend’s Academy Awards ceremony, Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars is a broad overview of Hollywood history filtered through the prism of their biggest night. In eleven chapters, he focuses in on the moments and the movements that have changed the movie business and the culture at large. The book starts, logically, at the beginning, as the nascent industry conceives of the Motion Picture Academy and its awards banquet. There are multiple motivations for doing so, from establishing film as a legitimate […]

“Dear friends I cannot rescue you”

If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton

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I heard about this collection last summer, in a context that will sound a little insufferable, i.e. at a poetry roundtable at an Irish Studies conference where we were discussing a fairly experimental work, but bear with me: someone brought up this collection as a poetry collection that, yes, was concerned with place, as so much poetry is, but one of those places was the digital world of Super Mario Bros. Well, that got my attention. But also I was tired AF from jet lag so […]

Romance in SWEDISH! I’m expanding my horizons

En enda natt (All In) by Simona Ahrnstedt

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Nowhere Book Bingo: First in a finished series CBR16 Sweet Books: New (new author AND first time reading romance in Swedish) Financial bad boy and seemingly ruthless venture capitalist David Hammar is a self-made man and has acquired his wealth and power for one purpose, which he is close to achieving. He is determined to take over Investum, one of the biggest companies in Sweden, owned and controlled by the powerful De la Grip family. Since the takeover might go smoother if his company has […]

First Book of the Year – A Book About Books

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence

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This is a late start for me this year—I have had a very busy couple of months. Hopefully things smooth out a bit! Lucky me, Mark Lawrence knocks it out of the park again. The man can write some serious engaging blends of fantasy and science fiction. With The Book That Wouldn’t Burn—the first book of his new trilogy—we have a love letter to stories, libraries and nostalgia.  Unlike a number of his previous trilogies (yes, the man is a prolific writer) The Book That […]

Classic Sci-Fi: Should you read it? 1984

1984 by George Orwell

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CSF:SYRI? Background For the past couple years I’ve been working on my own little reading project. I love the sci-fi genre with my entire heart. I also went to a weird religious middle and high school and I missed reading a bunch of classics. A couple years ago I finally read Slaughterhouse 5 and y’all, it is great! What other classic sci-fi have I been missing out on, I wondered, and tried to research the best I could. Of course the internet has all kinds of […]

Ain’t no mountain high enough

Evening Class by Maeve Binchy

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Remember book clubs? Ever been a member and getting a new book delivered home once a month, to be read or at least to help fill the empty bookcase in your living room? It was late 1990s and I and my then-wife were members of the Great Finnish Book Club. I don’t remember for how long, most likely only for a year. The monthly selections must have mostly been mediocre: there are not that many books left from that period in my bookshelves. (Or my […]



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