Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice.” (Bingo)

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

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#CBR11 Bingo: Listicle (on a bunch of best of 2018 lists, including NPR, Bustle and Bookbub). Would also work for “Award Winner”, as it’s won a Locus Award, and ALA Award and an Audie, or “Remix”, as it’s a fairy tale retelling. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of Jewish moneylenders, but her father is a dreadful one, who doesn’t have the heart to actually claim back the debts that the villagers owe, even when his daughter is starving and the long, cold winters are making his wife sicker and […]

“To be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie”

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

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I read and loved Flaubert’s Parrot in college, so I was really looking forward to reading another book by Barnes, especially a book that won the Booker Prize in 2011.  The Sense of Ending is a slim novella that winds a lot of ideas into its relatively few pages.  The plot outline is fairly simple: our first person narrator, a retired Brit divorcee named Tony Webster, receives a lawyer’s letter informing him that he has been left a diary in a will.  The diary belonged […]

Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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#CBR11 Bingo: Pajiba (reviewed by Kayleigh here) (Would also work for “Award winner”, “Own voices”, “Listicle”, “Cannonballer Says”, and possibly, “Far and Away”) Official book description: Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps […]

Why Is It Always So Hard to Review the Great Ones?

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

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Bingo Square: Award Winner I’ve been meaning to read this novel for quite a while now, but BR 11 Bingo was the final push to get me to start it.  I like sci-fi, but some sci-fi can become a bit dry and too technical for me to enjoy, and I feared this might be one of them.  As it turns out, I should not have been concerned about that at all. I also started reading Becky Chambers’ novels recently, so it was interesting to read […]

Our family’s favourite children’s books

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen

This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen

We Found a Hat by Jon Klassen

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#CBR11 Bingo: Award Winner  I Want My Hat Back has won award in at least three countries, including the Selezionato Mostra Internazionale d’Illustratazione per infanzia di Sarmede in 2011, E.B White Award Read Aloud Award for Picture Books in 2012, Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for Bilderbuch in 2013. This is Not My Hat won the Caldecott Medal and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Children’s Picture Book in 2013, and the Premi Llibreter de narritiva for Album illustrat and the Kate Greenaway medal in 2014. I Want My […]

Olivia understood that actually they would be happier without her

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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CBR11Bingo – Award Winner This is a Booker Prize winning novel from 1975. This novel also became a movie made by Merchant/Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplay, which she continued to do for other Merchant/Ivory movies. She split her career writing films and writing novels. The novel is told through a singular narrator, but two different narratives. There’s a contemporary narrative of the young narrator living in India and having researched her great grandmother, an English woman and wife of an English officer who […]



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