Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

That Feeling When Your Dog Retrieves a Dismembered Leg

Flight Risk by Cherie Priest

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CBR 15 Bingo – North America: This book is set in rainy Seattle, Washington, and we see plenty of the splendor of its nature as well. Leda, a travel agent and part-time psychic, gets swept up in the case of a dual disappearance when a couple is reported missing in seemingly unrelated circumstances. This is the second book in The Booking Agents series, which follows Leda and a skeptical police detective, Grady, as they solve confounding crimes. I read the first book a few years […]

Siskel & Ebert Get the Biography Treatment

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever by Matt Singer

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The core of Opposable Thumbs is the relationship between Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and how it turned into the entity “Siskel & Ebert” that still dominates the movie review and criticism landscape more than a decade after the death of its last surviving member. It is the nature of that professional relationship, born from a natural wellspring of competition, which turned into decades of increased media literacy. It began in earnest in 1975, when the two men met for lunch in a Chicago pub […]

Life and Death in the Asylum

Broadmoor Inmates by Nicola Sly

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CBR 15 Bingo – Violence: On their path to the asylum, nearly all of the people profiled in this book committed violence to others, and many to themselves as well. Broadmoor is a well-known psychiatric hospital that originally opened in 1863, but until the 1950s or so, the “criminally insane” people sent there were mostly there for confinement rather than effective treatment. I’ve always enjoyed true crime, but having also recently become intrigued by attitudes toward mental illness throughout history, I was excited to have this […]

She’s a Queen, He’s Just an Asshole

Second Chance with His Viking Wife by Sarah Rodi

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CBR15 Bingo – Europe: This book is set in Saxon England, and additionally includes Norse characters who immigrated there from Greenland. Teon hasn’t seen his wife Revna in years, when they were forced to wed to prevent a war. He hates Vikings, her father especially, and yet he can’t help but be drawn to her. I picked up this book because I’m trying to read more historical romance from different settings, and I don’t recall having read a Viking romance before, especially one it is the […]

Around the world in 72 days – and more than that

19th Century Female Explorers by Caroline Roope

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CBR 15 Bingo – In the Wild: The women of this book ventured into the wild spaces of pretty much very continent at some point or another. In the heyday of European colonialism, social mores were constrained for women, who were expected to stay domestic and tend hearth and home. Despite this, many European women managed to go traveling around the world on just as exciting adventures as their males counterparts did, and often recorded what they saw with clearer eyes as well. Truth is […]

‘since the play has gone down well, give us a clap/ and send us away with applause’

Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard

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CBR15 Bingo – Politics: This book examines the performance and politics of being the emperor of the Roman Empire. Many people can name an emperor of the Roman Empire even more than two thousand years after they lived, and are familiar with the stories of the excesses of their power. But what did being emperor actually entail? In this book, historian Mary Beard argues that being emperor in many ways meant playing the part of ’emperor,’ in the way that the Roman people saw them […]



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