Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

From civil war to safety

Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey by Margriet Ruurs

by Leave a Comment

While the story presented in Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey, is fantastic it is the art that really blew me away. It is an experience book that you must experience on your own, without any real background, to fully understand the delicateness of it all.  Margriet Ruurs found the artwork of Nizar Ali Badr online and found the artist after a lot of twists and turns. Long story short (you can read the story in the book), they collaborated. And Stepping Stones was born. […]

“I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself” Charlotte Bronte

Bronte by Manuela Santoni

by Leave a Comment

I was given a readers copy of this graphic novel. I was curious about it due to the interesting cover, and I like biographies told in graphic novels. And even if it was going to be a story/memoir like book, and not a “true” biography, I still thought it was going to be informative. I finally picked it up because I was looking for something easier to get into. I needed a break from the mess of novels that I had found myself tangled in […]

Connection and poetry

The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus

by Leave a Comment

I am always applying for reader copies from various of places due to my job. Then, every so often a book arrives at work.  I then say to myself, “Self. What did you order this time?” A while back I ordered The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus. From what I can tell this might be a reissue, however, the copy I have says it is due late March/early April 2021. I picked this powerful poetry collection about life, family, and an individual’s struggles one day at […]

“A Table of Alphabetical Hard Words”: Our First English Dictionary

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

by Leave a Comment

Quite a bit has changed since this book was written; language has changed, attitudes towards language have changed, and culture overall has changed. Some pieces from this book have not aged well; it’s rather dismissive of some languages and cultures (weirdly judgmental over Japanese writing, for example) while being aggressively defensive of others. There is also little-to-no attention paid  to the many additions given to English by marginalized communities; I was surprised to come across very little about the contributions of people of color have […]

Read it, like a child, into the night

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

by Leave a Comment

Helen Franklin is an English ex-pat in Prague on a mission to penalize herself for a mysterious past. However she cannot avoid the friendship of Karel and Thea and for a while she is almost happy. Then Melmoth appears. Melmoth is the an old tale of the wanderer, the one who is there to witness when no one else is and what she sees is the depravity, the loss the despair. Melmoth is just a myth, or so it seems until Karel gets a letter […]

Fun Trivia, Including Why We Say “Jock Strap” and “Beef”

by 3 Comments

I recently reviewed a book about how the 178 printed miles of the Oxford English Dictionary was created. Concurrent with that book, I was also listening to Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue.  While I wouldn’t say that one book was better than the other, I will say that if i had to pick only one, I’d pick this one. The wider scope of Bryson’s book gives you a little bit of everything – swear words, where names from come (think about “Goldwater” for a second), why kids’ […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo