Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Money, it’s a crime

The Assistants by Camille Perri

by Leave a Comment

CBR12 Bingo: Money! If this didn’t fit so perfectly into a Bingo square, I probably wouldn’t bother to review it. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to finish reading it. Tina Fontana is the personal assistant to Robert Barlow, an all-powerful media executive who basically the controls the news. He’s a billionaire, she makes $40,000 a year (Do men like Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch really pay their assistants so poorly? Eat the rich). A mistake on an expense report leaves her with an extra check […]

Just lovely

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

by 2 Comments

CBR12 Bingo: Cannonballer Says Man, am I thankful I read and took to heart ardaigle’s glowing review of this book. I had this checked out from my library before I even finished reading the review. And I really loved it. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is kind of hard to summarize. It’s about Lori Gottlieb’s career path that led her to becoming a psychologist. It’s about her own experiences being in therapy when she was going through a personal crisis. It’s about some of […]

No Room for Exceptions

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

by Leave a Comment

Keiko, 36 years old, unmarried, and childless, has been working at the same convenience store for the last 18 years. Aware of her own unusualness, she only feels at home in the store where she understands how to interact with people, and how to appear normal. Still, the pressures of society to conform by getting married, having children, or at least getting a more appropriate job, are always present. This is a sweet and short book that is on one hand firmly rooted in Japanese […]

That Invisible Frontier

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin

by Leave a Comment

Leo Proudhammer, a 39-year-old, black, successful actor, suffers a heart attack on stage. This prompts him to look back on the events and people that shaped him, from growing up poor in Harlem to trying to make it big in the theatre as a young man, and from his turbulent relationship with his older brother Caleb and his long lasting liaison with the white actress Barbara to his affair with the young revolutionary Christopher. The way James Baldwin dissects race relations in America may be […]

“Things sometimes fell apart unexpectedly. It was not necessarily a reflection of how much they were valued.”

Kingdom of the Blind (Inspector Gamache #14) by Louise Penny

by Leave a Comment

My local library system has reopened for pick up in the past couple weeks and Kingdom of the Blind was the first of my holds from way back in March to come in (and why I’m christening this book my No Money square for bingo in celebration of all things library). I was excited to see it, I love Louise Penny’s way of crafting story but unsure how much death and destruction I was in the mood for. I decided to give American Kingpin a […]

Books like this are why I love science fiction. #CBRBingo – Fresh Start

Children of Time (Children of Time, #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

by 9 Comments

Man, this hit me at just the right time, in just the right way. It was the perfect blend of escapism (events take place farrrr away and a verrry long time from now) and dealing with reality (humans gonna human even in the future and light years away). I almost don’t want to tell you anything about this book because if you go in unspoiled you are in for some surprises, but part of why I wanted to pick the book up is that I […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo