Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Where is la joie de vivre?

Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roche

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CBR13bingo – Book Club; My local book club is reading classics this year, and our July read is Jules et Jim, the source material for the French New Wave movie Jules and Jim. The introduction and afterword of my edition of this book, and other reviews, told me that it is a celebration of a deep friendship between Jules and Jim and a love triangle where “all parties are free and equal, always loyal to one another”. That what “only counts for the three of […]

“Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein.”

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

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CBR 13 Bingo Square: Fauna This is How You Lose the Time War came highly recommended by Cannonballers and all sorts of ‘best of lists’, it’s even a staff pick at Mysterious Galaxy (where it completes a separate bingo square for their summer reading bingo!).  I’m happy to report that it lived up to all the hype.  This is a love story unlike any I have read before, due to the science fiction setting and non-human characters, but it contains classic elements; enemies to lovers, […]

The future is an intricately beautiful machine

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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CBR13bingo: Machinery Thaniel works as a telegraphist for the Home Office, a master of the machine.  He’d rather be playing the piano, but his civil service salary allows him to support his widowed sister and nephews and pays the rent for his sad little room in a boarding house on the bank of the Thames. Mori made the exquisitely beautiful watch that was left on Thaniel’s bed in a velvet box.  The watch that saved Thaniel’s life, and brought both of them under suspicion of […]

This is US History 101 not CRT

Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd edition by Ida B. Wells

The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States by Ida B. Wells

The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition by Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, I. Garland Penn, F.L. Barnett

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CBR13bingo Uncannon Ida B. Wells is one of the most important and influential civil rights crusaders in US history, and yet I never learned her name in school. Born into slavery, orphaned as a teen, she became a world-renowned journalist who devoted her life to fighting US lynching laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exposing the truth about the victims and perpetrators of these heinous acts. As she fought to educate the world about the plight of Blacks in the US, she […]

A foundation for something more engaging

Troy by Stephen Fry

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Bingo: Mythic The story of the fall of Troy is baked into Western culture. As I read this book I was reminded of so many other cultural artefacts built on the same foundation. In my head I could hear Sinead O’Connor wailing “there is no other Troy for you to burn”.  I remembered reading The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri Tepper in my teens, where the women of this future dystopia ritually perform Iphigenia at Ilium each year, a reminder of the price that men’s […]

This is not the Deadspin writing I was expecting, and I am a million percent ok with that.

How Lucky by Will Leitch

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CBR13Bingo: Rep Daniel lives in Athens, Georgia. He has a job working in customer service for a regional airline, which lets him work at home and set his own hours. He likes his routine: visits with his best friend, football tailgates, and nice mornings out on his porch before work starts for the day. Early one morning, while out on his porch, Daniel sees something strange. He sees a young woman — he assumes she is a student — who doesn’t seem sure about where […]



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