Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s Wild That This Is Controversial to Say

Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern

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Best for: Those interested in how to respond to some of the accusations that come when one is fully supportive of a free Palestine and opposed to the occupation and genocide. In a nutshell: Sim Kern (they/them) is a Jewish author interested in debunking some of the common talking points people use to justify what Israel is doing in Palestine. Worth quoting: “When the oppressed call for ‘liberation,’ colonizers hear ‘genocide,’ because that’s all they know — they can only conceive of violent, oppressive relations […]

TLDR: Colonialism is bad

Rum: a Distilled History of Colonial Australia by Murphy, Matt

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Bingo Row 2 – culture Before Matt Murphy’s Rum: a Distilled History of Colonial Australia, I knew very little about Australia. And since most of that was from that Simpsons episode, it would be more accurate to say I knew of Australia. But I did know a decent amount about rum because I am interested in it (I drink it sometimes too), so I knew a large gap in my rum knowledge was in Australia’s history. Because everything else I knew about Australia was rum […]

Kin in Far-flung Places

A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao

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CBR17 Bingo: Diaspora – This story is intimately bound up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in colonial Fiji, who went to work there as indentured servants but were in reality little more than slaves. Caught between demotion and disgrace, Indian police officer Akal Singh is instead posted to colonial Fiji, where an investigation into the vanishing of an indentured Indian woman from a sugarcane plantation is complicated by the political pressures within the British Empire. I’m a sucker for an unusual setting in […]

“And if you say that’s because you lot barged into her home like a herd of mentally deficient sheep, I’m disowning all three of you.”

Bridgerton: The Duke and I (Daphne's Story) by Julia Quinn

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  Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings, has returned to England after six years away. Sworn to never marry, he wants desperately to avoid the scheming mothers and their unmarried daughters. Daphne Bridgerton, the fourth of eight children and the eldest daughter, is tired of being the “good old chum” to all the eligible bachelors, or attracting all the wrong ones; just once, she’d like to be looked at as a possible marital option by someone she’d actually want. When they meet at a ball during […]

“This, I thought, was how the real power-play went: conversations in corners and gardens, nods, shrugs, inclinations of the head. But nothing in writing.”

Lamentation: A Matthew Shardlake Tudor Mystery by C.J. Sansom

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It’s been a year since Heartstone, and Matthew Shardlake’s life is going reasonably well. He has a new steward, a new Law clerk, and Jack and Tamasin are soon to welcome their second child. True, he hasn’t seen Queen Katherine Parr in that time, the religious needle has swung slightly more to the “punishing Protestants” side meaning he’s going to have to burn some of his favorite books, and he has to represent Lincoln’s Court at the burning of Anne Askew for heresy, but that’s […]

Making the Sausage – Hollywood Style

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

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cbr17bingo Arts Schulberg, the son of a successful Hollywood producer, is probably best known for his screenplays (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd), but he started as a novelist with What Makes Sammy Run?, about a Hollywood publicist. This book follows about ten years later, and is the thinly fictionalized story of an ill-fated trip Schulberg made with F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Dartmouth.  Fitzgerald was nearing the end of his life and was trying to scrape together cash by working on screenplays for […]



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