Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Magical Mystery Ride

A Girl Called Echo Omnibus (Combined Volume) by Katherena Vermette

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A while back, I read the first volume in A Girl Called Echo series. And recently I was given a finished copy of the Omnibus. I like the word omnibus. I picture a large bus that has wings or something magical about it. And it carries a lot of things inside of it.  And that fits this story by Katherena Vermette as they created a story that has elements of the here and now, and time travel. Or a bit of magic. I have not […]

CBR15 Bingo: North America

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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CBR15 Bingo: North America I’ve been hearing about this book since it came out. So many people I know on the internet and whose opinions I trust have read, reviewed and absolutely loved it. So I feel bad only rating it four stars, but for all that that the story and the characters appealed to me, there was something that kept making me prioritise other things over listening more to the audio book, and I never really fully emotionally connected with this one. There are […]

A Deep and Dark Conspiracy

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI was utterly infuriating. I read it in anticipation of the movie that’s set to be released in a few months, and I knew it wasn’t going to be a terribly happy story. But I felt myself getting worked up about it none the less.  The Osage once possessed a territory that covered much of modern-day Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. But encroaching expansion from the US government lead to the Osage being mostly displaced […]

Americana Sports

Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association by Terry Pluto

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Read as part of CBR15Bingo: North America. The story of the American Basketball Association takes place exclusively in the United States and the organization has the word “American” in it. The other day, I was at a basketball team store when I saw a New York Nets hat for sale. I’ve tried really hard not to purchase clothes and hats these days but I just couldn’t help myself. It was beautiful, with the old school Nets logo. It represented everything good about the old American […]

Amerigo!? Heck no!

The Letters of America Vespucci and other documents illustrative of his career by Amerigo Vespucci

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Library Book Bingos exist for two reasons: 1. clearing my shelves of books that would have otherwise sat there and 2. challenging myself to learn new things. I don’t really like the second purpose. I prefer to read what I want to read and that is that. But this summer, all of my local libraries are doing Ocean themed bingos (boring!). One of them required a biography of a seafaring explorer. I knew little about Amerigo Vespucci, the man from which the word “America” likely […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]



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