Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“There’s power in finding secrets and blowing them up in a beautiful, bright light.”

Leather & Lark by Brynne Weaver

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The second book in the Ruinous Love Trilogy, Leather & Lark, hinges on a marriage of convenience trope, but that kind of undersells the stakes, this is a marriage of safety and sacrifice. Sure, it’s convenient to keep Lachlan and Rowan alive… but there’s more happening here. This book is way more character driven than its predecessor, but not because the characters are necessarily super strongly developed, but because the plot kind of disappears for a while. Action picks up about two years before the […]

CBR16 Bingo Week 6 Check-In: Late but Updated!

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Welcome to the CBR16 Bingo week 6 check-in. Check your numbers, check your tags. Ask any questions. you might have. There is a sinkhole in my kitchen floor, which completely wiped the check-in post from my mind. Wooooo! This is the kick-off post with the card, description, and rules. The Players: BlackRaven – 25 reviews, Blackout carmelpie – 7 reviews CoffeeShopReader – 10 reviews drmlz – 4 reviews ElCicco – 16 reviews, 2 Bingos elderberrywine – 7 reviews esme – 1 review faintingviolet – 9 reviews Jake […]

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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I wished someone would invent an online calculator – the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict. A calculator is laughable, unthinkable. Yet our moral sense must be made to come into balance with our art-love. I wanted there to be a universal balance, a universal answer. ― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma CBR16Bingo: Bananas We are living in an age where […]

“Didn’t you know the insides of dogs and cows and birds and fish are exactly like that of man? The only difference is the clothes we wear!”

The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales by Vasily Eroshenko, Adam Kuplowsky (translator)

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CBR16 Bingo: Dreams – Eroshenko’s fairytales give us glimpses of his dreams for a more compassionate and peaceful future where all are respected no matter their gender, race, class, or ability – and the fears he has about what may have to be done to achieve them. Fairytales as oral traditions bear the stamp of the cultures that tell them; fairytales when written by an individual bear the stamp of culture channelled through that individual, which is a different thing altogether. There really are some people […]

Whitewashed Histories and Walls

White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port by Kate Storey

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CBR16 Bingo: Cult – The Kennedys have rather a cult following, and in this book particularly we learn how many people were so fascinated they swarmed their homes in Hyannis Port. When the Kennedy family decided to make their summer home in Hyannis Port, MA, they little suspected how strongly associated the place would become with their aspirations and their scandals. I’m a Massachusetts native, but my family’s roots there don’t go back long enough to have really witnessed the heyday of the Kennedys in […]

“Comedy is laughter in the face of death”

Wyrd Sisters (1988) by Terry Pratchett

Witches Abroad (1991) by Terry Pratchett

Lords and Ladies (1992) by Terry Pratchett

Carpe Jugulum (1998) by Terry Pratchett

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These are re-reads, these are beloved, these are–I suggest–suitable for the fanfic square because they are riotous and revelrous games with Shakespeare plays and fairy stories and Dracula and witch traditions, even while they question the logics behind them. For example, as Pratchett points out, witches would probably not be dancing around nude during their eldritch rites because it would get quite chilly. Wyrd Sisters (1988) Autocorrect keeps trying to make wyrd into ‘word’, which is fitting, because this is a book partly about the […]



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