Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Magical Friendship: cbr12bingo – “Friendship”

Phoebe and Her Unicorn in The Magic Storm by Dana Simpson

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“Phoebe and Her Unicorn” began as a web comic by Dana Simpson in 2012 and then a few years later became a syndicated comic strip in newspapers, that is still in active publication.  The first five books in the series are compilations of those comics.  Phoebe and Her Unicorn in The Magic Storm is the first standalone graphic novel. Phoebe is an average girl who befriends a unicorn, Marigold Heavenly Nostrils.  Together they tackle the mundane, school, to adventure, like when they solve mysteries as the […]

Misty water-colored memories…. (CBR12Bingo 2: Nostalgia)

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

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So, this book is set in 2011, and I was getting married that year at age 25. Not strictly my teen years. However, I’m counting it for two reasons – 1) 9/11/2001 is key to the plot, when I was an actual sophomore in high school, and 2) though the Harry Potter books exist in this universe, Simon Snow is very very very obviously a Harry Potter analogue, and the penultimate book in that series was released in 2005, when I was in my first […]

A truly awful book to blackout my bingo card!

Mary Bennet and the Bloomsbury Coven by Beth Deitchman

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So, this is another published Pride and Prejudice fanfiction.  I mean, so are all of them I suppose, but even the title screams “fanfic.”  And if I had come across this book with this description online, I would have passed it by.  But a hard copy was handed to me, and so I set out to read it.  So let’s journey together, shall we? *Note – will contain massive spoilers*   It’s bad.  Mary has taken to reading novels instead of more “serious” works, her […]

Impractical knowledge is still knowledge!

How To by Randall Monroe

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I need to stop having expectations for books.  I thought this was going to be more like his book What If? which had strange situations and then gave a scientific method of answering the question.  This is taking a theoretically normal problem, but then solving it (still scientifically) in the weirdest and most impractical way possible.     (The version I have is an ARC, and I’m reading it on my phone, so things don’t always line up correctly. Which isn’t great, but hey, I didn’t […]

It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

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CBR12 Bingo: No Money! I discovered Three Women by Lisa Taddeo like many of my books–on NPR’s Best Books of 2019. I decided to use it to fill my No Money! bingo square. This was by far the easiest square for me to get. I get almost all of the books I read from the library, so most of the books I’ve read this year would work. Three Women is an apt description for this non-fiction account of the sex lives of three women. Their stories vary dramatically, but […]

Murderbot lives up to the hype: cbr12bingo – “Fresh Start”

All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries 1 by Martha Wells

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If memories serves, I first became aware of Murderbot through Cory Doctorow and was intrigued.  Then came all the love for Murderbot from Cannonballers.  When bingo was announced and there was a “Fresh Start” square, I knew immediately what I was going to read, All Systems Red. All Systems Red is set in a distant, space faring future, where all planetary exploration is done through the a corporate entity referred to only as ‘the company’.  Company requirements demand that Security Units (SecUnits) must be included as […]



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