Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

How people like me got to drink beer at baseball games

The Summer of Beer and Whiskey by Achorn, Edward

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Bingo Row 1 – Migrant When some other book challenge wanted me to read a nonfiction sports book, I found The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game by Edward Achorn. I didn’t expect it to crossover with the cbr17bingo because I didn’t expect to have anything to say about it. Clearly, I was wrong. The very long title summarizes the book. In the 1800s, baseball was reaching some sort of crisis due to […]

Didn’t Live Up to It’s Potential

Any Old Diamonds by KJ Charles

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Lord Alexander Pyne-ffoulkes bears a well deserved grudge against his father, Duke Ilvar, and has a plan to make him pay.  It involves getting a pair of thieves into his father’s remote, isolated estate in order to rob his stepmother of her jewel collection.  Which also means, Alec will have to convince society that he and Jerry Crozier are the best of friends.  It doesn’t take long for things to get out of hand, and Alec and Jerry find themselves having to keep up an […]

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now by James Delbourgo

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CBR17 Bingo: N – Re: the title. The obsessive collector in history has worn many faces – a magician, a scientist, a connoisseur, a madman – but whether they are a force for good or evil in their societies is a more complicated question. When I think of collectors I usually think of the modern kind who collects some specific category of kitsch because they like them, be it stuffed animals or porcelain figurines or Stephen King novels. As someone who dislikes clutter and has […]

Jane Austen and Jeeves Meet the Real Housewives of Sex and the City

Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes

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Bingo 13: Family Wives Like Us is sort of like Jeeves written by Jane Austen featuring the Real Housewives of the Cotswolds with a touch of Sex and the City (the focal friend group parts of it at least). It’s about a bunch of married or recently un-married ladies approaching 40 and their people, some husbands and kids, caring a little too much about their Instagram. Relationships are the key, both the married family kind, and the found family kind. On the one hand, this […]

Not the right chemistry for me

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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Bingo 12: School Some of the more significant moments especially towards the beginning of Lessons in Chemistry, as well as some later generally consistent episodes related to school work and learning put this one in the School spot. It’s no secret that being female in academia has been a challenge for a significant part of history, and Lessons in Chemistry starts with the worst parts of the 1950s-1960s horrific treatment of women in higher education (seriously, there should be a CW for the assault scene). […]

Casseroles, Jello Salads, and Few Funny Names

1982 United Methodist Recipes Albion NE by Albion United Methodist Church

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Bingo 11: Red I thought I’d dropped something into a box of very old things belonging to my grandmother and great-aunt so I dug through it for the first time in a long while. Turns out I hadn’t dropped the thing (found it a few minutes later under something else) but it was not a wasted search because in the box was a church cookbook (probably my great-aunts) from the year I was born, and guess what color the cover is? Going through a 43-year […]



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