Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

You’ve heard of Queen for a Day? This is Duchess for a Month.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

by Leave a Comment

CBR 17 BINGO: School, because Helene has Trinity and Oriel Colleges in Oxford on her must-see list and has a hissy fit when she almost doesn’t get to see them BINGO: School, Diaspora, G, Border, Work One of the surprising benefits of stumbling upon a beautiful, used copy of 84, Charing Cross Road is that it prompted me to read Helene Hanff’s follow-up memoir, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. I hadn’t known this book existed until very recently. Apparently, after 84, Charing Cross Road was […]

What is a flop, anyway?

Box Office Poison by Tim Robey

by 6 Comments

One of my coworkers and I love to chat movies. When his birthday came this year I went on the hunt for a book about Hollywood that I thought would be up his alley and while I couldn’t put my hands on my first choice for him Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris (a book I read back in 2008 before my time with Cannonball and LOVED) quick enough,  I went browsing shelves at the bookstore and Box Office Poison by Tim Robey jumped out to me and a copy was […]

A Giant of Scientific Thought and Deep Humanity

The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

by Leave a Comment

Bingo: TBR. This has been on my TBR for ages. [T]he history of science–by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans–teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.” In the midst of these terrible times, one of my greatest despairs is the damage being done to scientific research. In an effort to soothe myself, I […]

Another Infuriating Debacle.

Doctored by Charles Piller

by 2 Comments

This ended up being another one of those books I had to read over an extended period of  time due the stress it gave me. This book shares some similarity to John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood in a way, but it covers a field that I am somewhat less familiar with, which also contributed to it becoming a stressful read. In addition, unlike the Theranos story, you also can’t just lay blame here at the feet of a small number of individuals. The issues here are […]

Books about books are the best kinds of books

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

by 6 Comments

CBR 17 BINGO: Favorite (revisiting this old favorite for Bingo) BINGO: Favorite, Red, Family, Border, Green Visiting local bookshops is standard practice whenever my husband and I go on vacation. Recently in Vancouver, we wandered into a store called MacLeod’s Books, which is one of those places where you can easily get lost among the piles. Books are roughly organized into genres, but each section is overwhelmed with stacks and stacks of volumes spilling over from the shelves. This is the type of place where […]

This memoir legitimately deserves 5 stars, but I’m too angry to give it a rating yet

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

by 2 Comments

CBR 17 BINGO: “G” (for Glass) Back in 2019, I recommended Educated to my sister. After she read and enjoyed (not sure that’s the right word) it , she asked me whether I’d ever read The Glass Castle. “In some ways, it’s worse,” she told me. I finally got around to reading The Glass Castle, and I understand now where she was coming from. While Tara Westover’s parents were consistently ignorant and controlling, the parents of Jeanette Walls were people of dichotomy. Her father was […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo