Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“My unhappiness was rooted in my mother’s inability to stop drinking.”

There Was a Little Girl by Brooke Shields

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CBR17Bingo: “School” – because Brooke Shields talks a lot about the process of getting into Princeton and how much that school changed her life. I’d recently seen some media of Brooke Shields talking about her childhood, so she was in the back of my mind when I was hunting for another audiobook to listen to on my commute. Memoirs read by the author are some of my favorite audiobooks, so I was happy to pick up There Was a Little Girl (2015) by Brooke Shields and get […]

As Slippery as a Fish

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan

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“Billy Gould could not escape the growing suspicion that he had become entrapped in a book, a character whose future as much as his past was already written, determined, foretold, as unalterable as it was intolerable. What choice did he have but to destroy that book?”   I’ve saved the most flummoxing book of the year for the last square on the bingo board: a book which involves metafiction and magical realism in convict-era Tasmania. Thanks, Richard Flanagan. Gould’s Book of Fish has a convoluted […]

Two writers on an island

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

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CBR17Bingo: “G” I’m a fan of Emily Henry, and I’ve read most of her books, so when I saw she had a new one out: Great Big Beautiful Life (2025), I knew I would be reading it eventually. I thought this was an interesting read, although it’s not my favorite book by Henry. Alice Scott is a journalist waiting for her big break. Hayden Anderson is a pulitzer-prize winning non-fiction writer who is often grumpy. The two end up on Little Crescent Island vying for a job. […]

“But what I’m seeing is that the more comfortable he gets, the less he cares. As his importance compounds, his regard diminishes.”

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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CBR17Bingo: “Citizen” – Using my “Free” square for the Citizen square I had no knowledge of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (2025) by Sarah Wynn-Williams when my book club decided it would be our next book. I’m usually a fan of listening to memoirs on audiobook, especially when they’re read by the author, so I downloaded the audiobook. Sarah Wynn-Williams (Williams) is a New Zealander who had idealistic aspirations of changing the world. She began at the United Nations and then […]

History, women, and books

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes

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CBR17Bingo: “B” I first thought that The Boxcar Librarian (2025) by Brianna Labuskes might be a good present for my mother, since she was a librarian herself. But I wouldn’t give any book to my mother that I wasn’t willing to read myself, so I put a hold on it at the library. This book takes place around the Depression Era of the 1930’s, and the story follows three different women whose lives are unexpectedly intertwined: Millie, Alice, and Colette. Millie grew up on her aunt and […]

Where everything is explained

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

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CBR17Bingo: “Play” – because Gladwell discusses sports at Harvard I read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell back in 2009 and found it interesting. Since then I’ve read a number of other books by Gladwell that I’ve liked in varying amounts. When I saw that Gladwell had written Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering (2024), I was curious enough to pick up the audiobook. Gladwell uses examples to show how overstories, superspreaders, and group makeup influence a number of things in our […]



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