Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

And so the adventure begins!

Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins by Matthew Colville, Matthew Mercer, Olivia Samson (artist)

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Our household is BIG into Dungeons and Dragons (DnD).  My SO and I met at a LARP (live action roleplaying event) and we now play DnD with our kids.  When Critical Role (a DnD game run by voice actor Matthew Mercer and all the characters are also voice actors) debuted on YouTube we gave it a try and passed.  We weren’t interested in listening to other people play DnD.  In the years since Critical Role has blown up.  They are now on their third adventure […]

“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.” – Gustave Le Bon

The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie

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1,474 pages later and Joe Abercrombie’s ‘Age of Madness’ trilogy has come to a close in The Wisdom of Crowds.  Together they are a masterpiece in epic storytelling taking a slice of the Circle of the World from unhappy but with relative stability, through the madness of war and rebellion, to a new society tentatively hopeful that the change wrought has been worth the destruction and bloodshed. At the start of the The Wisdom of Crowds, the Union and North have already been through the quite […]

“We are the ones who ensure history exists to be written.”

One for All by Lillie Lainoff

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Have you ever heard the saying (not the Groucho Marx version, but the earnest one) about becoming a member of a club you don’t want to be a member of? It might just be pretty common in the circles I’ve run in, because I’ve mostly heard people talk about it in relation to loss – How you never want to become &/or welcome a new member to the parents of kids who’ve died club, or the widows’ club. Definitely clubs you do not want to […]

The most poetic tribute to trees since Joyce Kilmer

Tree, A Life Story by David Suzuki & Wayne Grady, with illustrations by Robert Bateman

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“A lightning bolt illuminates the sky, striking the highest point of the forested ridge.” Thus begins the biography of a single tree. Tree, A Life Story is a 700-year-long tale that begins with a Douglas fir dropping a seed from its cone in response to a forest fire and ends with the fallen tree continuing to supply the forest with nutrients even after death. In between, the authors trace the growth journey of the fir as it takes root, matures, and reproduces. But what could […]

A tale as old as time

The Women of Troy: A Novel by Pat Barker

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The Women of Troy is the follow up to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, her imagining of the Trojan War/Iliad from the point of view of the women and girls who saw their city fall and became enslaved to their enemies. The focal point remains Briseis, pregnant with Achilles’ child, with a few chapters from the view of Achilles’ teenaged son Pyrrhus. This novel finds its characters stuck in a sort of limbo; the war is over, the Greeks victorious but unable to […]

84, Charing Cross Road for baseball fans

Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger

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Last Days of Summer tells the story of a friendship between Joey Margolis, a Jewish kid growing up in 1940s Brooklyn, and Charlie Banks, a third-baseman for the New York Giants. Joey’s father is completely absent from his life, and it ain’t easy being the Jewish kid at school without a dad (he gets beat up a lot). As a result, Joey acts out, gets himself thrown into juvie for peeing in the reservoir, and embarks on a relentless campaign to get the attention of […]



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