Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.”

Kraken by China Mieville

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Cannonball Read Bingo: Black This. book. has. everything.  Sentient tattoos, supernatural picket lines, spearguns, squid cults, invisible truffle pigs, and human origami. What’s human origami, you ask? It’s that thing of when you use magic to fit an adult man into a envelope and then send  him in the mail to one of your enemies. Kraken is a police procedural, and a horror novel, and a fantasy satire.  But mostly it’s about the end of the world. It follows the misadventures of Billy Harrow, a […]

A Perfect Way to Celebrate the Movie’s 40th Birthday

"What Do You Mean, Murder?” Clue and the Making of a Cult Classic by John Hatch

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My apologies to anyone who wishes they didn’t have to know that this year is the 40th anniversary of the movie Clue. 🙂 One of the Read Harder tasks this year is to read a book about a piece of media you love, and I love Clue. It’s one of my absolute comfort watches, so hunting down this book became a priority.   Author John Hatch also views the movie as one of his favorites, and possibly more of a favorite than he realized before Covid-19 changed the way we […]

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

Two Political Fantasy Books

The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince by Robin Hobb

The Kingdom of Copper by S. A. Chakraborty

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cbr17bingo – Citizen (for The Kingdom of Copper, in which the shafit are second class citizens) The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince How does Robin Hobb do it? This novella is told in a straightforward, fairy tale-type manner, with relatively little dialogue, and it was still so engaging. I will admit, though, that I had some idea of what was coming. I vaguely recalled a brief mention of what happened to the Piebald Prince in The Farseer Trilogy, so part of the reason I was engrossed […]

Riveting and Original Thriller

Underground Airlines by Ben Winters

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Bingo: Green Every day is two worlds; every day we split into two.” I often can’t remember when or why I picked up a book for my TBR. I’ve had Ben Winters’s Underground Airlines for quite a while, but I don’t know what led me to the book. A review? Browsing in the bookstore? However I came across it, I don’t think I realized how good it would be. It is the 21st century and four states–the Hard Four–still allow slavery. This came about through […]

“Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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CBR17 Bingo: Review – I first came across Caitlin Doughty and her books through numerous reviewers on Goodreads. Caitlin Doughty had been long fascinated with death, but when she started working at a crematory, she soon found herself more interested in the question of why death in America has become so distant from the general public. I am maybe not the right audience for Doughty’s message about the loss of intimacy and ritual in the American way of death. I am a Hindu, and we […]



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