Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“look, I know you don’t believe me when I say I’m imprisoned in our slack workplace”

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

by 4 Comments

CBR14Bingo: Rec’d (I recommend this one! Fast and excellent skewering of Slack/work culture in 2022) This is one of those books that hit me at the exact right time. As someone who is constantly on Slack for work, I am still thinking about perfectly it skewered the grim experience of corporate tech chat messaging. Throughout the day today I was struck by how well he satirized various interactions. Several People are Typing gets everything about the tone and the purgatorial aspect of this platform while […]

Good lord almighty, this book was depressing. #CBRBINGO – Adapt

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

by 2 Comments

I was really looking forward to this one, but was unfortunately thwarted in my enjoyment by my own delicate little flower feelings. As it turns out, this is one of those books I like thinking about, writing about, and talking about more than I do the actual experience of reading of it. It put me in a terrible mood, and made me very unhappy. Wait, I take back the delicate flower thing. I’m more like a sponge, soaking up the atmosphere around me. And the […]

“That’s the last time I ever saw her:” Judy Garland in Decline

The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol by Mel Tormé

by 1 Comment

CBR14Bingo: Cold (the wintery chill of the sight of a full staff of people leaving a woman to slowly kill herself) While it was interesting reading about the behind the scenes of the ill-fated Judy Garland Show, this is a very sad book and it’s a grim look into the waste that can occur on the heels of abuse with no help afterwards. I think what struck me the most reading this is that Tormé never has the thought t0 get Judy some help — […]

“Me! But nobody likes me best!”

A Vicarage Family by Noel Streatfeid

by Leave a Comment

CBR14Bingo: Holiday (lots of holidays in this book) Another clearly beloved British children’s classic that I missed as a kid. A Vicarage Family is about (shockingly) a vicar’s family. More specifically it follows Vicky, the stand-in for Streatfeild, as she grows up during the Edwardian era. Isobel is artistic, Louise is pretty, Dick is the baby, and their cousin John is smart, but Vicky is always getting in trouble and doesn’t excel at anything. Her own strong sense of being wronged lead to her constantly […]

“I, Penelope Taberner Cameron, tell this story of happenings when I was a young girl.”

A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley

by Leave a Comment

CBRBingo14: Time (time traveling) I think this is one of those books that is a children’s classic in England but didn’t become as famous in the US, or else I just missed it as a kid. I picked it up on vacation in England recently along with two other children’s time travel novels, which seems to be a lively genre over there. A Traveller in Time is a book that’s very centered in one place, in this case the farm of Thackers. Uttley is wonderful […]

A Well Written Family Memoir That Didn’t Click For Me

She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockers

by Leave a Comment

CBRBingo14: Shadow (the family history is a shadow over the writer’s life) Sometimes you read a very well reviewed, technically well written, and well researched book and find the narrator annoying, and that’s what happened here for me. She Left Me the Gun is a memoir about Brockes researching her mother’s life after her death from cancer. Through her research, she finds out the truth about her grandfather’s abuse of his children, and she connects with her family in South Africa. This book is very […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo