Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When your duet partner chirps

Beatrice and the Nightingale by Patricia Newman and Isabelle Follath

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You ever read a book that was not Best Book Ever, but there was something about it that really hit you, that really made you feel, you really enjoyed, you got into, that gave you something? Beatrice and the Nightingale by Patricia Newman and Isabelle Follath was that book for me. I read it via an online reader copy, it will come out in mid February 2026 and I might get a finished copy. The idea is simple: a young girl from a musical family […]

How people like me got to drink beer at baseball games

The Summer of Beer and Whiskey by Achorn, Edward

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Bingo Row 1 – Migrant When some other book challenge wanted me to read a nonfiction sports book, I found The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game by Edward Achorn. I didn’t expect it to crossover with the cbr17bingo because I didn’t expect to have anything to say about it. Clearly, I was wrong. The very long title summarizes the book. In the 1800s, baseball was reaching some sort of crisis due to […]

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now by James Delbourgo

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CBR17 Bingo: N – Re: the title. The obsessive collector in history has worn many faces – a magician, a scientist, a connoisseur, a madman – but whether they are a force for good or evil in their societies is a more complicated question. When I think of collectors I usually think of the modern kind who collects some specific category of kitsch because they like them, be it stuffed animals or porcelain figurines or Stephen King novels. As someone who dislikes clutter and has […]

You are all Dead Spirits

Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People by Darren Rix; Craig Cormick

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So as a school kid in Australia back in the nineties, I remember being taught, like many of my peers, the Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? To add all the qualifiers, Cook and his crew are probably best described as the first set of Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia …after the dutch sort of poked around in the west.  But very little discussion time was given to the people that had lived in Australia for tens […]

“She writes that she will walk across the ocean to be with her lover. He sees this, not as a declaration of love, but as a statement of a single-mindedness so total that a kind of grandeur creeps into it.”

In Pursuit of Love: A Journey in the Footsteps of Obsession by Mark Bostridge

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CBR17 Bingo: I – Re: the title. Victor Hugo was the most famous writer in the world when his daughter, Adèle, left their home in Guernsey on a years-long mad pursuit of a former lover. Centuries later, author Mark Bostridge retraces her steps and tries to understand her obsession in the prism of his own life. I have not seen acclaimed 1975 film The Story of Adele H., so this was my first real acquaintance with the strange life of Adèle Hugo, whose story was […]

Sorry-Grateful

How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch

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CBR 17 BINGO: White (See cover) When Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021, I lost one of my heroes. A theater nerd in college with a proclivity for lyrics over music, I was won over completely by Sondheim’s poetry. Fans can endlessly debate which of his rhymes is most magnificent–the rhyming of “personable” with “coercin’ a bull” in Company is often cited, though I’m inclined to go with the brilliant throw-away line from Into the Woods regarding Jack’s cow, “There’s no time to sit and […]



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