Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it.”

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

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After reading The Long Way Home last year and The Nature of the Beast earlier this year I still wasn’t sure what Louise Penny had remaining up her sleeve for the residents of Three Pines and the remaining members of the Sûreté, but I knew not to worry about it anymore. While those books were heading towards a new direction, this book finally takes sure steps into the new reality these characters are facing. The Nature of the Beast accepted the new status quo, this […]

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

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In 2015 I read Ward’s Men We Reaped and I was fascinated with the way Ward’s language in a memoir was tinged with a bit of magical realism, and also just a larger than life feeling. At the time I put Ward on my radar – this was an author I was interested in a further relationship with. Once reviews for her 2017 work Sing, Unburied, Sing started coming in I knew this would be the one. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a big, award-winning book […]

Final Bingo Post – Bingos 9 and 10 with Karina Longworth

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood by Karina Longworth

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I’ve been a fan of Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This since 2015, and when Longworth announced she was writing a book about the Howard Hughes era of Hollywood focusing on the women who came into contact with him and telling their stories I was intrigued. After listening last year to the season “The Seduced” which served as an extended trailer for this book as well as a place for information that didn’t fit into the book (which at over 500 pages certainly has […]

“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (Bingo!)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

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This is my first O’Connor, which seems strange as a Catholic raised in the American South (maybe if I had gone to a catholic school?) and it is both fascinating and darkly comic, which I don’t know that I was ready for. O’Connor is asking the reader what does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be moral? Those questions are the heart of A Good Man is Hard to Find, and then doubled down by making it the title piece of […]

Bingo #3 With a Banned Short Story

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

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In a bit of bingo logistics, I decided a couple short stories might be in order to fill in as many remaining squares as I could. With that in mind I went down the list of things I’ve been meaning to read anyway and came across “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson which has quite the history of making people question its place in front of readers at all. What I didn’t know was just how short it really is – its only 3,773 words long! […]

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” (CBR11 Bingo)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Rosamund Pike (narrator)

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I have absolutely no idea how to review this book. Instead, I’ll tell you the story of my relationship with it. In my sophomore year of high school we read Austen for the first time. I clearly remember our teacher (looking back he was young, with long hair) stalking around the room selling us on an author only some of us had heard of, and attempting to inspire in us the mental fortitude it takes a 15 or 16 year old to really battle with […]



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