Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This is a book review

This Is a Book by Demetri Martin

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Damn you, pandemic. I legitimately can’t tell anymore whether comedians are mildly amusing, or whether they are sidesplittingly hilarious and I’m just not into laughing these days. I became familiar with Demetri Martin through his Comedy Central series Important Things with Demetri Martin. I definitely recall laughing out loud at some of his drawings, so no surprise that the cartoons and graphs included in This Is a Book are the strongest bits. The essays and short stories in this collection are kind of a mixed bag. […]

Incredibly timely, CBRbookclub is two for two this year in books that are unexpectedly relevant

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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The themes of gender identity and the LGBTQ+ spectrum were always going to be relevant for Pride month and An Unkindness of Ghosts was thoughtfully chosen for this book club.  However, current events have given an added layer of pertinence.  Earlier this year, the CBR Book Club had chosen Station Eleven and then we found ourselves in a pandemic.  This month we are seeing protesting to change a racist police system (and institutionalized racism) and An Unkindness of Ghosts has an outright rebellion against the […]

Advanced Bird Nerdery

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg by Tim Birkhead

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With the exception, perhaps, of the most dedicated vegan, all of us have cracked open an egg at some point in our lives: to scramble for breakfast, to make an egg drop soup, or, for those more reckless in our diet, to whip up a rich creme brûlée. Yet how many of us have ever paused to wonder about the complex mechanisms that go into the creation of the egg itself? A 19th-century abolitionist named Thomas Wentworth Higginson once said, “If required on pain of death […]

Loved the mystery and secret societies, current events made the excessive privilege stomach churning

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

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As much as I adore the Grishaverse, it was nice to see Bardugo flex her writer muscles in something new.  She certainly starts this book with a vivid sentence that seized me right away. By the time Alex managed to get the blood out of her good wool coat, it was too warm to wear it. Ninth House is gripping murder mystery, set in a version of our world where magic exists and is hoarded by the secret societies of Yale.  Perhaps you’ve heard of […]

Ghost Story

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The author’s note to National Book Award nominated YA novel Thirteen Doorways states that  “… it is … a story about girls. Girls with ambitions, brains, desires, talents, hungers. It is a story about how the world like to punish girls for their appetites, even for their love.” Inspired by the author’s mother-in-law’s real life experience in a Chicago orphanage in the 1940s, Thirteen Doorways is the story of Francesca (Frankie), a teen who along with her older brother and younger sister has been left […]

Kind of wondering what Queenie would think of current events?

Queenie by Candace Carty-Williams

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Official book description: Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle-class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth. As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to […]



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