Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Humane True Crime Recounting

The Ghosts that Haunt Me by Steve Ryan

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CBR Bingo: Snake Retired Canadian detective’s Steve Ryan’s The Ghosts that Haunt Me is a thoughtful, interesting look into cases that have stayed with him over the course of his career. I have read a lot of true crime, and this is one of the better books in the genre, particularly for its sensitive handling of victims’ stories and how their cases impacted the lives of their loved ones (as well as the investigators of their murders). Too often true crime can be salacious or […]

“How to quantify the quality of being alive?”

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

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CBR Bingo square: Bodies. I read this one closer to the start of my summer of Irish fiction, in an independent study with a student who needed just a couple more credits to graduate. I wanted something pretty contemporary to close out on, so I gave her a choice between Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars, which I’d already read, and The Wonder, which I had not. She picked The Wonder.  Donoghue has explained that this novel was inspired by the Victorian phenomenon of “fasting girls,” in which […]

Anti-Semites Get Theirs

Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America by Michael Benson

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CBR 14 Bingo: Bodies Bodies hit the floor a whole lot of times, if not permanently. With Nazism on the rise in 1930s America, protected by free speech laws, a Jewish judge sets out to deal with them in the only way he knows how – by setting gangsters on them. I’m not big on WW2 stories, mostly because I feel like the market is rather oversaturated. But rather perversely I’m still always on the lookout for unique stories in this setting, because those stories […]

CBR 14 BINGO – Week 3 Check-in

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Welcome to the Week 3 CBR 14 Bingo Check-in! You can see the card and the rules on the kick-off post. This week’s mood: Fire! I set tortillas on fire, Kansas set Justice Alito’s dreams on fire, and a bunch of you are cooking with fire.   Please check your tags and make sure you are using cbr14bingo. Ale – 4 reviews anana – 1 review andtheIToldYouSos – 1 review ardaigle – 1 review BlackRaven – Blackout booktrovert – 8 reviews Classic – 7 reviews CoffeeShopReader – 6 reviews […]

Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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Cbr14Bingo – Font — While there’s a lot of talk of printing, printing errors, and handwriting in this book, I am mostly looking at this as a sober look at the facts we know about the life of Shakespeare with the dry wit and editorial selection prowess of Bill Bryson. This book looks at the history of Shakespeare, as a person, and tries to sort out the facts. What this means is that Bryson looks squarely at what we know for sure based on specific […]

“No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.”

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

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In one word: Hopeful Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Cozy For a few consecutive months, I challenged my work book club to pick its book based on the heritage month (she says, realizing how smug she sounds) and thus, I read this book in April for Arab American Heritage Month. I was wholly unfamiliar with the author but excited to give something international a try. After selecting it for the club, I realized that my public library didn’t have a copy so I put one on […]



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