Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Going to Vegas is less fun when you’ve been kidnapped

Partners in Crime by Alisha Rai

by Leave a Comment

Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Skyline CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: Diversity Yet again resorting to the official plot summary, because I finished this in mid-April and I just cannot remember all the of details of the plot anymore: At thirty-five, with a stable job as an accountant, Mira Chaudhary wants nothing more than to find a boring man to spend the rest of her life with. Having had enough excitement in her younger days and desperately trying to escape her dysfunctional past, she turns to a […]

May-July Leftovers

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Tripwire by Jack Reacher

Baby Moll by John Farris

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Boyle

The Laundromat: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich

X by Davey Davis

Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship by Harvey Araton

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham

Ex Machina Book Four by Brian K. Vaughan

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite

Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond

That Kind of Danger by Donna Masini

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Spenser Confidential by Ace Atkins

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

by Leave a Comment

I usually do these at the end of the month but then I went through a big reading slump March-May. And then I roared back but realized I was behind. So apologies for this being so long. There Will Be Fire **** A good, readable text on a moment in history I knew little about. Even after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, I still had a lot of problem keeping track of all the socio-political dynamics so it’s good that Rory Carroll makes it accessible […]

Reading about computers in the ’80s is such a hoot!

Twice Shy by Dick Francis

by Leave a Comment

CBR14 BINGO: Dough, because it centers on horse racing and gambling BINGO: Series, Funky, Star, Verse, Dough My husband has a collection of Dick Francis novels, most of which he inherited from his grandfather, so they have sentimental value. When I was pondering what to read for the “Dough” category, he suggested giving one of them a try since they focus on horse racing and gambling. Dick Francis was a British steeplechase jockey who, post-career, wrote a weekly racing column and then branched out into […]

They’re Out!

Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series by Eliot Asinof

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR14Bingo: Scandal. The 1919 World Series was scandalized by eight members of the Chicago White Sox agreeing to throw it as part of a gambling conspiracy.  Bill James is a legend among baseball fans. His greatest rep is as the Analytics Guy but my first taste of his work was his text on the Hall of Fame, in which he critiques the process by which people enter. James devoted a chapter to baseball’s most famous banned people: Pete Rose and Shoeless […]

When You’re Too Hard Core for Raymond Chandler

Fast One by Paul Cain

by 2 Comments

Bingo square – People This noir classic was created when Paul Cain patched together five stories that he had written for the detective magazine Black Mask.  Published in 1933, it soon became famous as the book that was just too hardboiled to be fashioned into a movie.  And seriously, it is, even by today’s standards.  Daaaaamn son. Paul Cain was by then a slippery character in Hollywood.  That was not his real name, nobody was quite sure where he was from (spoiler, Iowa, actually), and […]

A Mother-Daughter Thing

The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett M. Davis

by 1 Comment

I found this book on a list of unusual true crime reads. I suppose on some level this can be classified as a “true crime” book. Illegal gambling is a crime and I guess Fannie Davis was technically a criminal if you’re going by the letter of the law. But this is really more than that. It’s a story about a daughter’s relationship with her mother, how it evolved over the years, how her mother embraced her unusual profession and used it to make a […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo