Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Was Tracy Flick the proto nasty woman?

Election by Tom Perrotta

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Cbr12bingo adaptation, Bingo #3 (vertical, Music to Violet) The movie version of this novel came out in 1999, and I have never seen it in full so I cannot tell you how faithful it is to the book. But I can say that this is a really fun read, and pretty quick. Author Tom Perrotta employs a variety of characters as narrators recalling the events of a few short weeks in the spring of 1992. One might not think that a high school election for […]

Say Their Names

Six Days in Cincinnati by Dan Mendez Moore

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Cbr12bingo No money I received this graphic history as a gift recently. It’s a short book about the race riots that rocked my hometown Cincinnati in 2001 and about the systemic racism that runs throughout our country still. Writer/artist Dan Mendez Moore was a high school student in Cincinnati when police violence led to public demonstrations, riots and a curfew. This story, first published in 2012, revisits his experience of those days and provides the point of view of key community leaders who were also […]

The bridge is love

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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Cbr12bingo Roaring Twenties I know I read this book in high school, but I didn’t remember much about it before re-reading it this week. I think it’s the kind of novel that means more to you the more you’ve lived and seen of the world, and reading it in our very troubled times was a kind of balm for the soul. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, published in 1927 and winner of the 1928 Pulitzer, is the fictional story of five people whose lives […]

In the Garden of Eden

Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller

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Cbr12bingo Orange, BINGO (color diagonal) Bitter Orange is a rather dark and twisted tale, perfect for those who enjoyed Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. Set during the summer of 1969, this novel features Lyntons, an old abandoned English home in the country, full of secrets and perhaps ghosts; Cara and Peter, an attractive and lively couple who are temporarily in residence there; and a single, middle-aged woman named Frances who also spends the summer there and acts as our narrator, reviewing the events of that time from […]

I remember the Russians

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

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Cbr12bingo Nostalgia This book, set in late the 1970s Soviet Union and published in 1981, marks the time of my teenaged years, a time when my personal interest in the Russians began to grow (leading to a long stint in graduate school and a PhD in Russian/Soviet history). Gorky Park was made into a movie (which I never saw) and Martin Cruz Smith went on to write a number of Arkady Renko detective/thriller novels. I think I might have read one of them (Red Square) […]

“Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators …. But they don’t carry it the way victims do.“

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisenger, Steven Scott, Harmony Becker

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Cbr12bingo Shelfie This graphic novel geared toward young readers is an eye opening first hand account of the Takei family’s experience in the US’s Japanese internment camps during WWII. World renowned actor George Takei relates his childhood memories of being uprooted and shipped across the country with his family and reveals his subsequent struggle to come to terms with the injustice and trauma of those years. Even though many of us may have heard about the camps before (thanks in part to the hard work […]



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