Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You want to know if they’re the mittens I wore to Biden’s inauguration. That’s all anyone wants to talk about these days: mittens, mittens, mittens.”

Feel the Bern by Andrew Shaffer

by 5 Comments

CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries #1 When Crash, a new intern working for Bernie Sanders, accompanies her boss up to a small-town festival in Vermont, the last thing she expects is to discover a dead body – or that Bernie will insist on trying to solve the mystery. A few years ago I read Hope Never Dies, a comic mystery where Obama and Biden team up in the post-2016 election season to uncover the truth behind an Amtrak conductor’s death. Now Shaffer has […]

Remember the nothing class of Home Ec? Turns out it’s got a past.

The Secret History of Home Economics by Danielle Dreilinger

by Leave a Comment

What do chemistry, business, politics, and social justice have in common? I’m betting that no one would have automatically though “Home Economics!” but that’s exactly what The Secret History of Home Economics show. It all started with Catharine Beech, Olivia Washington (3rd wife of Booker T.), and Ellen Swallow in the late 1800s where educational opportunities for women were few and far between. By contextualizing studying chemistry as women as a way to develop better household practices, these ladies and more like them developed one […]

I wasn’t ready for the Alex Craft series to end.

Grave War by Kalayna Price

by Leave a Comment

CBR14 Bingo Square: Shadow I’m a big fan of witches and magic mysteries, so I got immediately hooked on the Alex Craft novels. In book one, Alex uses her magic to raise shades, which aren’t quite ghosts. More like the memory imprint of a person after they pass. It’s a very handy skill to have a shade testify in their murder trial. Alex has been quite a few personal revelations, a love triangle, and an angry fae queen by the time we reach the final […]

Greatest Debilitating Body

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR14 Bingo: elephant. The title has an elephant in the logo mold of the symbol of the Republican Party, which is an elephant. Also, the filibuster is the elephant in the room on why our congressional body is in stasis.  Like other history/political books I read, I often judge them based on how angry they made me on each page. This one is definitely up there. Adam Jentleson, a former staffer for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has written a quality look on […]

Slightly Baffled

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

Warning: here be spoilers America, sometime in the near future. Astrobiologist Theo Byrne raises his son Robin alone after the death of his wife. He feels like he’s doing a terrible job, especially when Robin is sent home from school for smashing his only friend’s face with a thermos. Robin is a complicated child; intelligent but suffering from Aspergers, ADHD, OCD and probably a few other things. Theo is weary to accept the decision; Robin’s school, meanwhile, is pushing him to put the boy on […]

Nightmares, just in time for Halloween

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

by Leave a Comment

CBR14 BINGO: Gaslight, because Trump BINGO: Snake, Minds, Series, Cozy, Gaslight I make it a habit not to read books about politics, especially books about Donald Trump, because my sanity can only withstand so much. However, the “gaslight” category got me thinking about maybe breaking that rule. I had a copy of The Fifth Risk on my shelf, and I figured if anybody could get me through this, it would be financial journalist and nonfiction author of The Big Short and Moneyball, Michael Lewis. The Fifth […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo