Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Frank was great, the rest, shrug

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

by Leave a Comment

I was looking for an audiobook for my beast of a commute to work (an hour/hour 15 each way) and checked for an audie award winner and this one won for best female narrator and that was good enough for me! I knew diddly about it, but figured it would be something to pass the time, and to that end, I was correct. Well-written, interesting, and filled with fun characters it had all the markings of a good novel but I didn’t like some of […]

Wave After Wave, Slowly Drifting…

The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow

by Leave a Comment

A few days ago, I read Martin Scorsese’s interview reflecting on The Irishman and his career in general. A small tidbit in the interview was that he and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro had passed on adapting The Winter of Frankie Machine in the aughts. De Niro read it and liked it, almost as much as he did I Heard You Paint Houses, which was adapted into The Irishman.  The Irishman was one of the better movies I saw in 2019. I’m a big Martin Scorsese fan. When I read that […]

Sometimes your mom does know best

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

by Leave a Comment

The Bride Test is the second romance from Helen Hoang. I had to figure out what all the buzz was about for myself and was not disappointed. I absolutely love the illustrated cover. Definitely don’t want this trend to go away. I haven’t gotten around to her previous book, The Kiss Quotient, but thankfully, this series can be read as stand-alone books. The characters simply inhabit the same universe. After a tragic loss, Khai Diep believes he can’t feel emotion because his grief didn’t follow […]

Hard Livin’

No Human Involved by Barbara Seranella

by Leave a Comment

I don’t usually seek out drug addict fiction. I’m not an addict or a recovering one but like many, I have loved ones who are both and it’s not something I really try to engage with when reading for leisure. I did enjoy Sara Gran’s Dope earlier this year, but besides that, I can’t recall really engaging with a fictional work featuring a drug addict in the lead. I can’t remember where I originally read a recommendation for Barbara Seranella’s Munch Mancini series. Maybe Christa Faust, who […]

California here we come; right back where we started from

California by Edan Lepucki

by Leave a Comment

Some dystopia novels are trying to be literature, some are trying to be good trashy fun, some are trying to be profound and fail terribly, some are just way off the mark. Then there’s the category I’d put California in, which is the kind of book that doesn’t really seem sure of what it’s doing, and thus never really makes a mark on the genre or the reader. Meet Cal and Frida! They’re a typical 20-something couple in the 2050s just trying to make it […]

In A Hopeless Place

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: Listicle. “20 Best Crime Novels of 2018” -crimereads.com It’s interesting to me that Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective made CrimeReads.com’s list of 20 best crime novels of 2018 considering how widely panned it was. Many reviewers said some variety of “How can the man who wrote Motherless Brooklyn produce such dreck?” I think such sentiment comes with unfortunately high expectations. I read Motherless Brooklyn earlier this year. It was excellent, definitely one of the best things I read in 2019. And it made me want […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo