Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Their voices

Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore & the Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology by Amber McBride, Erica Martin, Taylor Byas and LLC Ashwin Writing

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Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore & the Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology by Amber McBride, Erica Martin, Taylor Byas and LLC Ashwin Writing (photographer) is getting a lot of press. It will get a lot of awards and a lot more attention before things are said and done. And it deserves all and everything it gets. It is a very lovely collection of poems. We have contemporary poets and classical ones, too. You will know some of the poems and others will […]

It appears that 19th century soap opera adventure stories are my thing!

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

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Reviewer Note: In 2024, I started to read the free version of The Count of Monte Cristo that is available from Project Gutenberg (my go-to resource for novels in the public domain). After reading 200 pages, I couldn’t understand why I was so bored. This novel has more action than a Die Hard movie, yet I was struggling to stay interested. I decided to do some research into what’s considered the best translation of this novel, and I found recommendations for the edition translated by Robin […]

For any girl who ever broke up with a guy because her friends or family didn’t approve

Persuasion by Jane Austen

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CBR16 BINGO: Liberate, because Anne liberates herself from her ridiculous family and finds love Double BINGO! Diagonal: Détente, Fiasco, Dreams, Horses, Liberate Four corners and center square: Bananas, Détente, Rings, Liberate, Dreams Poor Anne Elliot is saddled with a vexing family. Her father and older sister, Elizabeth, are snobs of the highest order, while her younger sister, Mary, does her best to make herself the center of attention and whines about every minor inconvenience. Anne is, by any sane person’s standards, practically perfect in every […]

Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

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CBR16 BINGO: Horses, because Gulliver spends several years with the Houyhnhnms, a highly rational race of talking horses Take a nice, English surgeon and send him around the world, where he encounters all sorts of heretofore unknown races, and eventually he’ll come back absolutely hating on humanity. Gulliver’s Travels is so ingrained in popular culture that everyone knows something about it. I can’t remember my first introduction to the story, but it was probably in the form of a children’s comic book or animated special. […]

The Banality of Good

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

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Otto and Anna Quangel are indifferent toward living under Nazi rule, but when they receive the news that their son was killed in the war, they begin a silent campaign of defiance. There’s a phrase in the afterword that’s used to sum up the central theme of this book – ‘the banality of good.’ There’s plenty of well-known stories of resistance against oppressive powers from all eras – certainly plenty I can recount from World War Two alone, plenty of lives saved and a huge […]

Hey, Boo

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

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CBR16 BINGO: Bananas, because this is a frequently banned or challenged book, and banning books is bananas. I have different reasons for re-reading certain novels. Sometimes I re-read a favorite book simply because I know it will make me happy. Sometimes I want visit with characters who feel like old friends. And sometimes it’s purely practical, like when I need clarity before continuing a series. With a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird, which many of us read in high school, a re-read is a […]



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